I was on the phone last week to some guys at the University of Toronto school of engineering (about another matter entirely) and I asked what they made of the Y2K situation. My phone correspondent said, "A lot of people here took it very seriously. About half of them thought it was gonna be a real disaster. They're absolutely bewildered that nothing much happened."
     It was oddly reassuring to hear, at least, that serious science-oriented graduate students and college faculty felt that way, because the scale of the fizzle was so extraordinary -- I mean, who wants to feel like an alarmist kook?  Their reaction would seem to support the notion that nobody really knew what might actually happen, that every authoritative predicition, forecast, position about the event had been, essentially, a wild-ass guess, including among those who knew computer systems history pretty well. Well, sane adults are entitled to have their opinions taken seriously
     In any case, by mid-January we have heard of scattered failures in some credit card systems, accounting and payroll systems, sattelites, local governments, and schools, but nothing that could be reasonably called major. There are a lot of rumors about industrial accidents, ammonia spillages, gas pipeline breakdowns and fires, and oil refinery glitches, but little verified.
      Ther "termite theory" of Y2k is still operable -- the idea that most of the computer failures will occur in the accounting and administration systems of corporations and government agencies over the first several months of the year. The termite theory holds that much of the damage will remain invisible for a while. Certainly no corporations or governments are jumping up and down, making faces, to say that they have problems. It's reasonable that they would attempt to conceal them until either they are quietly fixed or they can no longer be concealed -- for instance when checks cannot be mailed out.
     So I'll stick with a wait and see flag for a while longer.
     Y2K computer problems aside, we're seeing extraordinary turbulence in the equity markets that ought to put the fear of God in any citizen who wants to live in an sane and rational economy. The situation on Wall Street has reached new delusional heights. meanwhile, the price-per-barrel of crude oil is set to penetrate the $30 level in the coming week. What inflation. . .?  Stay tuned a while longer.   

First Week After Rollover

     Before the event, there was one thing that practically everybody agreed on about Y2K: that nobody really knew what was going to happen, especially at the midnight rollover on New Years Eve. The phenomenal lack of apparent problems with electricity grids and nuclear plants and basic infrastructure all over the world that ensued on the rollover came as quite a shock to many of us who had reasoned that something had to give.  I daresay even the most confident official Y2K cheerleaders, such as Senators Bennett and Dodd, and John Koskinin of the President's Y2K Preparedness Council, must have been stunned by the complete dearth of incident (even while they crossed their fingers to the point of numbness).
      I was certainly amazed myself. Well, one prominent commentator, Cynthia Beal (who I believe may have passed away before the end of 1999), had said that Y2K would turn out to surprise everybody.
      I still believe we're in for some problems, and of the same kind that I stated in my December update -- a long, slow, grind of chronic, accumulating, amplifying computational errors that will become apparent only ocer time and will make life difficult for many of us. This is my gut feeling based on the notion that Murphy's Law has not been suspended and that the rollover was too good to be true -- even for the $1 trillion spent world-wide.. In any case, we really won't know more until a period of time goes by, weeks or perhaps months. If the rollover was a surprise and a shock, then it seems to me that this unprecedented techno-problem still retains the capacity to affect and shock us.
      This is a nation addicted to happy endings. I just don't believe that life is like television. Let's wait a decent interval before declaring victory.
      A personal note: my own PC crashed Monday morning, Jan. 3, sending the direst error messages I ever saw -- something like "system cannot detect hard drive" or something like that. By some miracle of sheer dogged re-booting, I got back to the Windows "Safe Mode" screen and from there made it back to the regular Windows desktop. But for about a half-hour, I thought I was the ONLY victim of the Y2K bug in the world! And I had carefully loaded the McAfee Y2K Survival Kit program in December. Stay tuned. . . .
       

Return to Home Page

Copyright © 2000 James Howard Kunstler