Millennium Hoopla: Some Have Had It Up to Here

You’re seeing spots. Three of them. The same awful ovals, over and over, trailing a deuce like a big caboose. You feel sick, tired. Finally, you have to hurl--anything--at the next person who tries to stick “the official” and “of the millennium” in a sentence with “Vienna sausage.”

This is the real Y2K bug, the annoying rash afflicting people simply bugged by the ear-splitting sound of a round number coming up on one of mankind’s little mileage markers. A moment so precious that it will be marked with a kiss, a cocktail, a cringe or a snore at the stroke of 24 different midnights.

Well, some people are sick of it. Sick of the scary scenarios, the contorted product tie-ins, the forgettable memorabilia, the grasping ego trips disguised as parties thrown by people with boom-year bonuses for brains. Sick of the lists that reflect the reality only of the people who compiled them. Sick of next year’s nickname, which sounds like all police have to go on to catch a hit-and-run driver.

These are people who, if they have to party, plan to defy a pop cultural imperative and party like it’s, oh, 1992.

And don’t even get them started on the stockpiling. Soup kitchens nationwide suspect donations have dropped in some locations because some of the selfless have become survivalists. Some millennial malcontents think too much charity is starting at home and staying there.

Jules Hersmann works for the American Refugee Committee, a humanitarian agency based in Minnesota. It’s greeting 2000 by falling $200,000 short of what it needs for programs aiding victims of real terror and catastrophe.

“You have billions of people on this planet for whom the year 2000 means nothing more than another day of survival,” says Hersmann, who plans to celebrate the millennium in a cabin in the woods, a little cranky that she can’t drink champagne because she’s pregnant. “A family of seven in Rwanda could probably survive an entire year on what some people are stockpiling in their refrigerators and freezers.”

Seeking to Hammer Out a Record

Once a wistful ETA for Utopia, the Year 2000 is arriving not like a newborn bundle of better tomorrows. It’s careening your way like an obnoxious uncle with a millennial scotch in his hand and commemorative cigar clenched between his teeth, bent on getting you to buy a special millennial life insurance policy. Even Habitat for Humanity--the Georgia-based charity that builds homes for the needy--is flying humans and hammers to Fiji so it can catch one of the early midnights and lay claim to the first good deed of the 2000s.

But some people have stopped listening. The coming whatever--the calendar we use indicates that the current millennium isn’t over until it’s over on Jan. 1, 2001--is mere background noise. Polls taking the millennial pulse of the people are finding it slowing to a scarcely sentient thump as the big day draws near.

Most people plan to stay home, stockpiling little more than cold duck and onion dip, trying not to doze as Dick Clark--who finally seems to be looking pretty old, frankly--tries to keep people pumped about celebrating a New York minute based on a calendar that wasn’t even invented until someone in Rome decided it was 526. A moment dictated by an international time zone system that Congress didn’t require states to use until 1915, and which some countries still ignore. China, which should have five time zones, insists on only one big one. Australia slices its three time zones into half-hour increments. Move fast enough, you could toast three midnights in 90 minutes.

Though far from perfect, at least the current system will let Americans see if the day that would be doomsday telegraphs its punches as it slowly descends on this mortal coil.

“That’s one of the nice things about living on the West Coast,” says a cheerful Bill Friedman, who runs a bookkeeping firm and sits on the City Council in Bend, Ore. “If the lights are still on in New York, we can go to bed at 9:30.”

Barring Armageddon, Friedman plans to do just that, with nary an extra jug of water, cord of kindling or cache of canned corn on hand at home. At work, he’s had his 13 networked computers undergo their 2000-year checkup, a mandatory move to avoid even the appearance of unpreparedness, just in case somebody starts pointing fingers if a ledger vanishes into the ethernet. Though he’s convinced it won’t.

And, if so, so what? “We’ll get out the candles and green eyeshades and quill pens and go to work,” he says.

People like Friedman have been planning an early bedtime for a while. They’re staying home to avoid the hoopla, not hunkering down to weather Revelations. Many have to work, darn it, because the doomsayers have convinced the boss that he should at least be staffed with a full complement of suitably stunned employees in case the big Quigley account is blown to bytes.

Likewise, cops are pulling New Year’s Eve overtime because, based on contemporary electoral behavior patterns, no public official wants to be held accountable if terrorists with a consistent track record of staging the completely unforeseen decide to strike at the one moment when everybody is most expecting them.

Some people who have to work as caterers or waiters or in some other service capacity are reportedly demanding quadruple and a half per hour in overtime, thanks to a turn-of-the-century, turn-of-the-screws labor shortage that lets the underpaid at least surf the low-paying jobs at their leisure.

Then there are the people who work with computers. If only for the sake of appearances, they have to be with their babies when the big ball drops. The little brats.

“We plan to redirect and shut down all our corporate, commerce and affiliate Web sites for about three hours during the rollover,” says Todd Halterman, a 39-year-old Web site consultant who works in Michigan and Indiana. “This precautionary measure is more about Y2K paranoia than any sort of real danger.”

And if someone happens to be e-shopping for action figures while everyone else is sawing logs, stacking Spam, locking lips or slurring their way through “Auld Lang Syne”?

“As one of our fellow e-commerce types said, people who are engaged in ordering products over the Internet in the hours preceding and directly after New Year’s Eve really need to get out of the house more,” Halterman says.

It’s Compared to Christmas

Commerce, in fact, has become the official fly in the official avocado dip of the next millennium. Mercantile overkill has taken a perfectly fine holiday and turned it into something that only one other occasion can match for sheer exploitation.

“It’s become even more commercialized than Christmas,” says Stefanie Clay, a 32-year-old Web site developer in Bel Air, Md. “I am tired of seeing 2000 and Y2K everywhere.”

Clay plans to fly to Austin, Texas, to visit a friend on Dec. 31 and return home Jan. 3, provided the air transportation system doesn’t somehow get even worse. “I’m taking more of a laissez-faire attitude than I probably should as a computer professional,” she says. “I hope the Y2K paranoia will turn out to be just that, so we can look back on this New Year’s with a chuckle.”

People can chuckle right now by heading to www.everything2000.com, where the law firm of Dechert Price & Rhoads has posted hundreds of millennium-based trademarks that are helping drive the turn-of-the-century fad right into the ground.

How does one get to be the “official donut” of the new millennium? Trademark that series of words before all the other doughnuts think of it.

This is why people are being pitched products by companies claiming to be the air freshener, beef jerky, balloon, brick, binocular, fishing tackle, canned meat,

personal injury law firm, speakers bureau, suntan, morning show, basketball team, lightbulb and--honest--official Vienna sausage of the millennium.

“Of course, there is no such thing,” says Dechert lawyer Glenn Gundersen of Philadelphia, who wrote a book on trademark law. “It’s a self-bestowed title. The result is some millennium gridlock.”

Some of these trademarks are oddly abstract and almost comically cosmic: The official icon, energy, scent, pleasure, look, song, welcome, goddesses, angels, baby and guy have all been trademarked. Need the official time of the millennium? It’s taken. Playboy calls itself the official magazine, Uncle Ben the official food. Another company claims in an old-fashioned manner that it’s the “official Space Age condom” of a millennium that is clearly being defined by cyberspace.

Yet consumers are a diverse lot, and one segment may well be as enchanted by the hype as another is appalled, says James Bettman, a Duke University marketing professor. Bettman found himself quite put off from purchasing an upscale champagne that was positioning itself as the official bubbly of the Greenwich Meridian, which is ground zero for time zones.

‘Frankly, this whole thing kind of took me by surprise a bit,” he says of the Year 2000 cacophony. “There is this kind of interesting mix of hope and awe and fear that seems unique.”

Bettman says that ambiguity was reflected by a Nike commercial showing a man jogging obliviously through a city ablaze on Judgment Day, with the trademark oh-who-cares-about-everybody-else tagline: “Just do it.”

Yet it’s clear that many bids to be the official consumer rip-off of the new millennium are bombing. Millions of Earthlings ignored Jewel in Alaska. “Puff Daddy” in Miami and Los Lobos in Los Angeles. Sting, feel thy death in New York. All the entertainers had pricey New Year’s Eve gigs canceled because of lousy ticket sales.

For the first time in 20 years, the snooty Breakers restaurant in Palm Beach, Fla., hadn’t sold out. Spago in Chicago? Ah, sit anywhere. Cruise line companies that offered exorbitant New Year’s Eve boat rides are leaning queasily over their own rails, suffering a severe case of vacant-cabin fever. A Washington hotel has been reduced to auctioning off its New Year’s suites complete with champagne for a paltry $75, maybe a fourth of what it costs on a normal night.

Even the Oregon town of Bend broke up its party because, as things progressed, it just seemed like a waste. City officials told the Chamber of Commerce to put something together, and they came back with a plan to blow off some fireworks as a new $6,000 clock captured the special second.

Eh. Friedman says the council had second thoughts and offered to finance half the fete if some local business wanted to cover the rest. There were no takers, and Bend may as well shuffle off to bed with a glass of warm milk.

After all, 2000 has been inching closer for some time now. People who once saw it as a special time to do something special are now facing something that looks suspiciously like a Saturday.

*

Times researcher John Beckham in Chicago contributed to this story.

* Y2K DISCONNECTS: Seattle cancels its gala and a nation is told not to dial up. A9

* COUNTDOWN TO NEW YEAR’S: Organizers scramble to prepare for L.A. millennium parties. B1