Y2k Chapter 19 Epilogue

Ralph Brandt on Feb 20, 2011

Tags: 2000, Clinton, COBOL, Computers, conscription, draft, Gore, Government, IBM, military, Politics, programming, snafu, y2k

More about Y2K.

Author’s note:

I am not sure if I will ever finish this. It was originally started in 1998 when I was one of those programmers. I was seeing event horizons come and go. I saw several businesses have near disasters and some had significant problems in spite of the work being done. One government agency I worked with had un-detected several event horizons that adversely impacted their being able to pay bills. Another came close. Several of the businesses I worked with had operations hampered significantly. The government printed gobs of money and staged it in case a bank had to be bailed out on a bank run.

I have been asked if the president has these powers. My dad was civilian draftee from 1942 till late 1945 working in a food plant in a job he could not leave without being arrested.

In 1999 I was actually traveling 300 miles out of town every week; two flights in each direction, working with a company, helping them get ready. I helped put together a contingency plan that put me at home. Like Randy Baker I wanted to be here with my family. I honestly think that faced with the conscription that I depict here I would have risked it to be home.

My home had two kerosene heaters, about a month of Kerosene, a 5 KW generator and enough gasoline to keep up refrigeration and heat for over a month by only running it one hour of six, assuming the natural gas held. We had pulled up a small stock of canned food and bottled water and bought three garbage cans that we filled with water for other use on 12/30. My son in law who was also knowledgeable on the subject made some lesser plans. I know of very few Y2K programmers who did not make plans of what to do if things went badly.

Some bought guns and ammunition. Some moved to rural cabins on 12/30/99. It was almost uniform. The more the person knew; the more they were concerned.

I have talked to some of them in the last 10 years. Even the ones who did very little planning are uniform in one thing. We dodged the bullet. The consensus is: We did enough work to avoid it. The power, water, gas, and other utilities replaced the items that would have failed. Actually there were fewer than thought because most measured elapsed seconds not a date in seconds, minutes, hours, day, month and year. Few would have failed. Those were fixed. Hospitals, 911’s, police, fire and other key elements had serious remediation programs. Without that we would have had significant problems. Our infrastructure is so integrated that pull out one leg it can collapse.

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