The Day the Earth Stood Still
Bring out your dead!” cried the middle-aged man, who had formerly been a CEO of a top business company, and was now clothed in a brown cassock, his head clean-shaven, like that of a hard-boiled egg. No, this is not the fourteenth century and the Bubonic plague is not rampaging across Europe, wiping out a third of the world’s population; nor is this a scene out of Stephen King’s The Stand; it is January 1, in the year 2000. The Millenium Bug has hit and it has hit hard, the world has shut down, launched back into medieval times. Technology no long exists; it is now a true case of survival of the fittest. Man has once again become the very thing he dreaded not to, primitive. He now has to start all over again, rebuilding society, in the hope of reaching an existence somewhat similar to that before New Year’s Eve, maybe this time He might get it right?
Around the world people are christening it “New Year’s pandemonium . . . creating worldwide chaos” (P.S. Huffstutter). It is really quite surprising to discover that some people do not actually know what the Millenium Bug really is. It is not the panic or hysteria created by the public, that is simply a possible offset; it is a computer programming mistake that was missed by its creators. The problem stems from the mass production of computers in the 1970s, where they were programmed to read only the last two digits of the year, resulting in the saving of costly memory and storage space. For example instead of the computer reading 1995, it reads ’95 instead. A growing dilemma has arisen from this “oversight”: at midnight on New Year’s Eve of this year the computers change the year from ’99 to ’00. The question is whether they will read it as 1900, or will not comprehend the change and simply crash and stop working. If the computer resets to 1900, then there will be no real problems, except for some which will be examined later. But, if the computers decide to crash, we may have a real problem on our hands. A lot of the recent computers will remain unaffected, because they were made to work past the year 2000, but it is the older ones we have to worry about. The ones that run things like power utilities, the water supply, banks, communications, traffic signals, hospitals, airports, defense systems and the electrified fences of prisons. These providers of basic necessities and securities have been around for a long time and therefore still have their old computer systems, and it is these key public functions that may very well cease to work at the turn of the millenium. As well as these, other some electronic devices may stop working such as VCRs, pagers, automotive controls, coffee makers, facsimile machines, and home security systems. There is also the threat of possible terrorist attack, and even accidental missile launch, because Russia’s military is in such disarray.
It is at this point that I would like to give the reader an idea of a possible worst-case scenario. It probably will not come to as extreme a case as that described in the introduction, but then again, everything we take for granted, food, water, protection, insurance, will be stolen from us and we will be left at the whim of Mother Nature. Of course, in time, all can be rectified, but time it will take. To put the whole matter in perspective, it is like having acres and acres full of trees, holding thousands of oranges, and it is simply a case of picking off those oranges, but there are literally hundreds of oranges on each tree, and thousands of trees. We simply do not have enough time to correct every single computer.
Now we shall examine whom the Millenium Bug will actually affect. Basically anyone who has a computer that was not made in the last five years or so. Funnily enough, third-world countries, like Ethiopia for example, will remain relatively unaffected, simply because they are not that advanced in their technology. There is an irony here, in that when the Millenium Bug hits, these third-world countries may well be lending so-called developed countries a hand, whereas at the moment the complete opposite exists.
A private consulting firm, Gartner Group, has made worldwide predictions as to what extent certain countries may suffer. There is a 33% chance of major computer crashes in countries such as Mexico, Brazil, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, France and Hungary; a 66% prospect of systemic failures in countries such as China, Russia, Pakistan, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia; and 15% for the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Switzerland and the Netherlands (Art Pine).
As for how people are treating this “inevitable technicality,” it varies. One in four believe that the Millenium Bug will directly affect them (P.J. Huffstutter), then again, one survey showed that 40% of about fourteen million small businesses do not plan to take any action at all to deal with the problem (Art Pine). “Because no one can predict what will happen, few doubt its existence” (P.S. Huffstutter). At the same time, hundreds of thousands of people are stocking up on things like food, water and even weapons. An anonymous corporate attorney, from Newport Beach, has stocked up on twelve months worth of food, including weapons; a housewife has stored hundreds of gallons of water, an insurance executive has stockpiled enough food for his family for five years; a doctor has preserved months’ worth of dried food (P.S. Huffstutter). At the same time families are deciding to take some of, if not all, their savings from the banks, before New Year arrives, which has resulted in the Treasury having to print an extra $75 billion (P.S. Huffstutter).
If the Millenium Bug has been around all this time, why didn’t we know about it sooner? Well this leads on to a further sub-issue, where this sort of “unfortunate circumstance” has taken place more than once in the past and is still currently going on.
The point to take heed of here is that we, as a society, never really consider the consequences of our actions. As soon as some supposed genius comes out with a new invention that will revolutionize the world, he submits it to a few years of standard tests and “spits” it out into society, where we, the public, readily eat it up like some new better-tasting candy. Then, as years pass and new inventions take their place on the market, the old ones continue to be used, but are considered less important and it is at these times when things start to go wrong, resulting in problems like pollution, the Greenhouse Effect, and the depletion of the ozone layer, to name but a few. Then comes the question of ethics on topics like genetic engineering and cloning. At first, these propositions appear to have unlimited possibilities, but with every good outcome there is ultimately a bad; some of these include hybridizing animal and plant genes, as well as the cloning a human being. Now, we know these are terrible things to even contemplate, but you just know that there is someone out there either conducting these experiments as I write these words, or at least thinking up some scheme to execute them.
This takes us right back to this dreaded Y2K affair. The Millenium Bug is somewhat different to the examples mentioned above, in that it is basically an immaterial thing, since it actually takes place on the screen of a computer, and because we can’t actually grasp hold of it, we tend not to believe in its authenticity; and yet the hi-tech glitch is a component of the personal computer, the very crux of today’s modern civilization.
According to Governor Gray Davis, the state of California has completed 75% of its repairs. He has ordered a halt to any government computer project not related to the Y2K problem, as well as assigning a special emergency team to consider plans for a “worst-case scenario”. It has been calculated that the State has already spent more than $340 million on repairs and it is estimated to reach as much as $1 billion. Government agencies and corporations around the world are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to repair data-sensitive systems. The medical industry has been sited as being furthest behind in repairs, with 90% of US physicians and 64% of hospitals being unprepared (Art Pine), and as for the transportation industry, they are not sure, because a lot of airports began their reparations too late. Put it this way, I wouldn’t like to have a flight booked over the New Year period. In an LA Times article, Dave Lesher reports that “most state officials are optimistic, if not confident, that they will at least repair the critical state systems responsible for public health and safety before a self-imposed deadline of September 1” (Progress on Y2K.). Nevertheless, a lot of departments have no contingency plan in case of computer failure, at the turn of the century.
Now, it may be all good and well to know that the government is at least trying to get itself in order, but what can the millions and millions of innocent civilians do about it? Well, one has a number of options. One is to stock up on things like food, water, clothes, money, any of those basic essentials that may not be readily available in the new year, because it is eventually going to come to a case of “while stocks last”.
Another possible solution is to carry out the five-step approach to solving the year 2000 problem, put forward by Bryce Ragland in his book The Year 2000 Problem Solver. Step one consists of awareness, where we are not merely aware of the problem, but of the magnitude of this oncoming problem (53). Step two is assessment, where one finds out what is going to be affected (56). Next is renovation, where you actually make the changes, but do not implement them (58). Step four, validation, consists of making sure that the systems are thoroughly tested (58). The final step, implementation, consists of carrying out and rectifying what is going to be affected (58).
Of course, there is always the choice of just sitting back, letting things take their course, and seeing what happens. Ragland theorizes that the “chances are the computer will not crash. It will continue to run, but it will be corrupting your data.” (9). By this he means that the computer will “think” that the year is in 1900 and from then on every date will be read wrong. This will lead to somewhat minor problems (compared to the entire situation) with things like program management software, completing interest on your investment, and other computers that specifically need the date, like alarm systems and bank safes.
Personally I think not much is likely to happen, and whatever does crash, will most likely be up and running again within a short time. Then again wouldn’t it be a “pleasant change”, I hesitantly intone, if we had to recreate our society all over again, at least this way we’d know what to avoid and what would lead to long-time problems. It all comes down to a case of “you’ll just have to wait and see”.
The CEO of one of the biggest and most successful businesses in the state looked down at his expensive Rolex he had got for his birthday. The clock-face read 11:59; the digital dial read fifty seconds, and the date December 31, 1999. The thousands of people surrounding him, dressed in confetti of all colors, had already begun the countdown. This was the approaching dawn of not only a new year, but a new century and a new millenium. A burning anxiety quickly began to build in him, as the seconds ticked away into oblivion; this was it.
“5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . ?”
