The Non-Affair of the Millennium: Working Y2K Shift

If the year 2000 bug fails to screw up most of the world’s computers, it will still mess up the social lives of tens of thousands of people stuck working the ultimate graveyard shift.

For folks such as Matt, a mild-mannered customer support staffer at a Compaq Computer telephone center in Kansas, it’s worse than just missing out on the party of the millennium: Matt’s fiancee is moving to the U.S. from Africa that week.

“We were going to spend New Year’s together with my family for the first time,” he said after learning that he and his 300 colleagues all have to work Dec. 31. “It was kind of a shock. I never imagined I would be spending New Year’s like this.”

Some companies are trying to make the non-affair less painful, offering cash bonuses and other goodies to ease the sting of waking up Jan. 1 without a hangover.

An increasing number of employees at utilities, at banks and in other industries are getting bad news about their duties around and on the last day of 1999, and those at computer and software companies, the core of the digital economy, are getting hit the hardest.

One Hewlett-Packard lab in Silicon Valley used to shut down completely for the week after Christmas. This year, it did an about-face and won’t allow anyone at all to take a vacation.

“They want to be able to say, ‘Mr. Customer, don’t worry, we’ll have all these resources available to give you warm fuzzies,’ ” said an HP software architect who, like most technical people interviewed for this story, expects little drama on the night in question.

Many high-technology companies are barring their employees from taking vacation during the last two weeks of this year and the first two weeks of next year and are ordering them into the office in round-the-clock stints on Dec. 31.

But there still may be a party. Compaq is hiring a band, at least at its Houston headquarters. (Matt in Kansas will be stuck with a potluck dinner.) Packard Bell NEC is wheeling in big-screen televisions for New Year’s Day football. Microsoft plans to show its employees a string of movies, possibly on the theme of mass destruction. Packard Bell will raffle off new computers to staffers working four-hour shifts around the New Year’s clock.

“We’re basically going to have a party,” said Don Jones, Microsoft’s director of year 2000 readiness, who heads an 85-person squad. “We’re going to have a deejay and good food, and you can bring in spouses and children.”

Still, that’s a fair piece short of serious extra money for the grunts. Compaq, HP and others said they don’t intend to go that far.

Some technology companies are making sure that in addition to core staff on site, a larger number of specialists are sober and on a short leash in case the call goes out for reinforcements.

“A lot are going to be maybe within one hour’s drive of a customer base, with their pager on,” said Hewlett-Packard spokesman Brad Whitworth.

Companies also vary in their period of concern, from just two weeks to several months.

“Most problems are not going to be Cinderella-like, showing at the stroke of midnight,” Whitworth said. HP’s red zone goes from November until March, and it pushed back an annual retreat for top sales producers from mid-January to April.

Some companies that already rely on outsourcing customer support, such as financial software maker Intuit, are simply preparing to lease more of that help.

Although they feel compelled to plan for the worst, most technology companies anticipate smooth sailing.

Microsoft may be the cockiest, going so far as to plan an awards banquet for those employees who did the best job making sure Microsoft software wouldn’t crash with the millennium. Microsoft has scheduled the banquet for Dec. 31, putting the pudding before the proof.

But others feel confident as well.

“We’ve tested every bit of legacy equipment that we can. Hopefully, we’ll be like the Maytag repairmen,” said Don Liedtke, chief information officer at Sacramento-based Packard Bell.

A number of major companies either don’t have a master plan yet or won’t say what it is, including IBM, Sun Microsystems and Unisys.

That’s one way to avoid seeming overly concerned, if nothing explodes--or foolishly unconcerned, if disaster ensues.

Even in the case of a forced march, a number of the rank and file say they don’t mind working New Year’s Eve.

“There could be problems all over, and I’m more concerned about helping people than just partying,” said Cisco Systems technician Luna Lum.

Cisco, the top maker of equipment for routing traffic over the Internet, has a huge staffing plan that includes Chief Executive John Chambers working at midnight.

Other Cisco customer service reps said it doesn’t seem like such a bad idea to stay in an office on a night when “all the crazies are going to be out,” as one put it.

Still, at least from the standpoint of employee relations, some tech companies might want to take note of what those outside the industry are doing.

Burson-Marsteller, a public relations firm that counts Sun and Andersen Consulting among its high-tech clients, is promising cash, champagne and hotel rooms--after everything blows over--to those who volunteer for New Year’s duty.

“We were unsure whether we would be successful in staffing it with volunteers with the modest stipend,” said Gus Weill, a Burson executive in New York. “In fact it was oversubscribed. We attribute that not to the small cash payment, but to the sense it’s a historic chance to participate in a tremendous communications challenge.”

Uh, sure--and then there’s the added challenge of figuring out what to do with champagne and a weekend with one’s significant other in a nice hotel.

It’s not surprising that Burson was able to recruit several hundred people to staff its 24 Y2K “command centers.”

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Joseph Menn can be reached at joseph.menn@latimes.com.