Y2K and January Fools’ Day: Biting Back at the Phantom Bug
It’s been more than a week since we held our collective breath and waited for the technological reckoning the new millennium judgment day would bring.
But on New Year’s Day, and every day since, the phones have worked, the coffee makers have perked, the ATMs have coughed up the money we need.
And the so-called experts and computer consultants who warned of disaster--while picking our pockets--have yet to stop forecasting doom:
It’s not over, they warn. Don’t let up. Disaster may still strike next week, next month, from computer flaws as yet unseen. It could be a year before we’re out of the woods.
I have one thing to say to those disaster-mongers and computer geeks who made a killing predicting--then protecting us from--Y2K doom: Shut up, already. Go away and leave us alone. Isn’t it bad enough that you took the fun out of an evening many of us had looked forward to celebrating all our lives, that you alarmed us into staying home in droves, clutching flashlights and battery-powered radios, waiting for the lights to die?
Just wander off and count your money, quietly. And leave us alone to count our blessings and scratch our heads.
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“I don’t understand it,” my sister keeps saying, as she contemplates an attic crammed with cans of tuna, bottles of water, cartons of soap and toilet paper, 20-pound bags of beans and rice, an as-yet-unopened wood-burning stove.
I don’t consider her part of the lunatic fringe--she’s my little sister, after all--but she was among thousands of Americans who took Y2K warnings to heart, big time.
She made the rounds of Y2K conventions as they traveled through our Ohio hometown. She stoked the profits of the vendors they featured--firms that preyed on Y2K hype to rake in millions peddling survival gear. Along the way, she amassed a collection of doomsday books and pamphlets and pored over them for advice on how to prepare.
At best, they predicted, the new year would bring disruptions in utilities and medical service. Water plants would fail, electric power would be interrupted, mail deliveries would be delayed.
At worst, our entire economy could collapse, as small businesses failed and computer glitches shut down manufacturing plants, hobbled transportation systems, stopped the production and delivery of food. Those unprepared would wind up broke and desperate. Months of anarchy could ensue.
“I didn’t believe it all,” my sister says now. “I just wanted to be prepared.” And she was. And now she feels, if not foolish, certainly perplexed.
“What I don’t understand is how these other countries fared so well, the ones that did practically nothing to prepare.”
That’s the $200-billion question these days . . . because that’s the estimated price tag for the fixes American companies and government agencies made to head off computer problems.
To hear self-styled Y2K experts tell it, our nation averted disaster through hard work and big spending. But how to explain those other countries, who spit in the face of Y2K and still emerged disaster-free, unscathed.
The government of Great Britain, for instance, spent less than one-tenth of the $8.4 billion our government spent. And we spent more than 100 times what Russia spent on Y2K compliance.
“Russia was supposed to be in mass pandemonium by now,” my sister told me on the phone, as we surveyed news accounts on New Year’s Day. Instead, Russia’s minister of atomic energy joked on Russian TV that morning that his country’s only evidence of Y2K failure was when “I was shoveling snow and the shovel broke. I am sure it was the Y2K bug,” he said.
Indeed, reports of disruption around the globe were so sporadic and mundane as to be almost comical. An X-ray machine at a hospital in Norway failed. A subway ticket machine jammed in Australia. A cluster of apartments in South Korea went without heat for several hours.
And while I’m grateful that the world was calamity-free, I am also a bit chagrined that we, alone, took the threat of disaster so seriously and battled it so expensively.
In the words of former Pentagon spokesman Paul Strassmann, who offered this New Year’s Day assessment: “I think we have been had.”
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I wish I’d written this column months ago. I would have looked brilliant now if I’d had the guts to say then what I thought would go wrong technologically, as we slid from the old century to the new.
Nothing.
But like most of us, I was just worried enough to hedge my bets . . . to buy an extra case of bottled water and stuff a few hundred dollars in my dresser drawer; to load up on tuna fish and peanut butter, and fill up my car’s tank on New Year’s Eve.
And stay home to celebrate with my family, rather than risk venturing out into a world that might dissolve into chaos when the clock struck 12.
Sandy Banks’ column is published on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.
