Found this in Computerworld and thought it was humorous:

Your year 2000 project might be in trouble if . . . Michael Cohn

The clock's ticking. You're swamped. Your year 2000 project is way behind. Yet the grown-ups on Mahogany Row still think it's a hoax. They laughingly boast that they'll be flying commercial on Dec. 31, 1999.

Well, flying is one thing; landing's another. Take my advice: If your year 2000 project exhibits any of the traits on this list, you're dead meat. But stay calm. It's not yet time to place your head between your knees. With luck and hard work, you can fix the fiascos of year 2000 ... probably by 3000.

1. Your project team's first meeting dissolved into a melee over whether 2000 is really a leap year. (Worse, one of your best programmers took a cinnamon roll in the eye and quit on the spot.)

2. Your project manager now insists you call him "Commandant," has piled sandbags around his desk and claims it's stupid to keep remediating 15 million lines of assembler code when 60% of the world's nations have barely started -- including several with nuclear capability.

3. The megapriced time-and-material consulting firm that's been working on the project since 1994 promises the assessment phase is almost complete and should have an inventory to you "any day now."

4. Two of your LAN administrators swear they can make every 286-based PC in the place year 2000-compliant simply by whacking it really hard on the side at 11:59 p.m.

5. Human resources says your emergency request for retention bonuses is "under consideration" and suggests casual Fridays as an alternate retention strategy.

6. Your contingency plan consists of Stella down in payroll, who thinks she still has a manual typewriter in one of the kids' closets.

7. You bought an expensive tool that can set a mainframe's date back 28 years. Now the vendor claims that you haven't paid the license fee since 1970.

8. Your CEO gets in front of a camera and says, "We budgeted $200 million for year 2000. My neighbor's kid fixed the whole thing over Labor Day weekend for forty bucks. Mowed my lawn, too!"

9. Fortunately, your mission-critical, million-lines-of-code vendor has finally finished making its package "year 2000 functional." Unfortunately, that means it functions until 2000.

10. The CIO still claims that he can fix 300 million lines of code manually and plans to bring contractors on board in 1999. About 87,000 of them.

11. You asked the vice president of manufacturing to assess all the embedded systems in 42 plants worldwide. The only noncompliant device he came up with was a Mr. Coffee in a break room in Topeka.

12. The executive committee has concluded that it can solve the problem by replacing 16 of your core corporate systems ... and plans to start writing a request for proposals right after Christmas.

13. You finally get a meeting with corporate counsel after 15 phone calls. The first thing he asks is, "What exactly do you mean by the term 'year 2000?' "

14. You plan to devote 50% of your time and money to test boxes, test tools, test staff, test direct-access storage devices, regression tests, integration tests, data agers and path-coverage analyzers, which at this rate can all be in place some time around March 2003.

15. There's a shrine to Bill Gates in the computer room, and third shift nightly prays he'll soon come up with something to fix this whole mess.

Cohn is working hard on year 2000 and plans to for many, many years to come.

-- Gayla Dunbar (privacy@please.com), September 24, 1998

Answers

Gayla, thanks again.

First you brought tears to my eyes, then you made me laugh. The world needs more people like you

-- Michael Taylor (mtdesign3@aol.com), September 24, 1998.

Michael, what a nice thing to say....thanks!

-- Gayla Dunbar (privacy@please.com), September 24, 1998.