Y2K QUOTES FOR THE MONTH OF JUNE/JULY

I'll tell you straight out, the reality isn't 93 percent [compliance of Federal mission-critical systems]. The reality is somewhere around 50 or 60 percent at best. The real problem is that private industry is also somewhere around 50 percent or less. I have received several credible reports of businesses just starting this month or planning to start next month. What I don't know is how much our civilization depends upon computers. - Cory Hamasaki

Whenever I run into someone who might know anything about Y2K, I try to find out what they know. More than one source tells me the FAA isn't done. They aren't 92% done. They aren't going to be done on July 1. They might get done by December 31, but they might not. Make your plans accordingly. - Alan Rushby

To my knowledge, even during the Iranian crisis in 1980 and the war with Iraq, I don't think the entire FBI had been on alert and all annual leave canceled [from December 15 through mid-January 2000].... It's a mess. They're very much behind. If it was a 72-hour 'snowstorm,' you wouldn't bring out 12,000 FBI agents on stand-by and, for the first time maybe in FBI history, cancel everybody's annual leave for a 20-30 day time frame. That's very significant. In my line of work, that's called a clue. - special agent within the Department of Health and Human Services

My conscience is bothering me and I've got to say something.... I have been warned by management that if I go public or say anything negative it's my CAREER. They'll destroy me. I've been in the business for 30 years and I'm too old to change careers. I can't identify myself, but I can speak out. I work for an electrical utility.... If our company is indication, the lights ARE going out next January at the crack of midnight. We don't have time to test every piece of equipment. What we're doing is TYPE CHECKING, which is just a fancy of way of saying SPOT CHECKING. Just the other day I looked at a Phillips VRZ262-Q7 unit that monitors the current in four 05388 subassemblies. I wanted to check everything but my supervisor said, "NO just check one assembly." We ASSUME that the other three will be OK. We're doing the same thing with our Siemens System 3 SCADA; we're only looking at some of the RTUs. They've declared the DPS system to be "non-mission-critical" so we're not even checking it! I'm worried because we've been laying off people right and left to cut costs for the past 5 years.... The company is being run by kids in business suits, and these geniuses think that they'll be able to hire the private contractors to help out in a pinch. BUT THEY'RE GOING TO BE OVERLOADED, TOO. The April 9 drill was a PR stunt.... I don't know what everyone else did but I can TELL you what we did. We talked to each other on walkie-talkies and had a great picnic. One day last winter we advanced the dates on the EMS and the power went off. Cascade failures knocked out a bunch of other stuff. Because of that the geniuses decided that we can't test the entire system, so we just work on "spot remediation." We make sure all the dates LOOK right so that we can claim good numbers in our reports. The first time the whole system will be tested together is January 1 2000! ....Prepare people. Don't let the Happy Faces fool you. You should be ready for a week at least with no power on New Year's with random outages of 4-6 hours for at least another YEAR. Or WORSE. - worried utility worker

Step back, the remediation failed last year. Remember, December 31, 1998 and all of 1999 for testing? March 31, 1999, I'm shaking my fist to show you that I'm pumped. Then it's "Lets run a Y2K Test and show them that everything works!" Well no, Peach Bottom 2 blanks the monitors, City Hall traps the LA mayor, Van Nuys floods the park with 3 million gallons of sewage. June 30, 1999 and everyone, absolutely everyone is ready or my name isn't Albert Gore, uh, John Ko-skin-em, no... whatever... We have 184 Days now [on June 30], and the DC Government has announced plans to drag in locomotive-sized generators to run the water pumps AND in the same report, the hospitals are hoarding, uh, storing up to 90 days of water.... the horn-hairs around here are SCREAMING, "NOBODY PANIC, we're renting locomotive sized generators", we've told the cops they'll be working as armed guards at the food and water stations, uh, let's call them "warming centers".... the DeeCee horn-hairs are trying to get another, what was it, 60 million dollars from the feds; what's this for? Snacks, tidying up a few loose ends.... How did we get into this mess? How did the conventional wisdom pass us so suddenly? ....I never expected a multi-million-gallon sewage spill. And we have 184 days to go. - Cory Hamasaki

As the chairman of the state of Georgia's Y2K task force for the State House, I have studied the possibilities and contingencies closely. I have had many conversations with national leaders such as Congressman Steven Horn, Newt Gingrich, Bob Barr, to name a few. There are facts that the Government doesn't want you to know. John Koskinen, the nation's Y2K czar, has instructed each state to prepare their contingency plans to include 18 cities without power for 3 weeks. The Department of Defense is quite concerned about our power grid on that New Year's Eve. The chances are good that there will be attempts made by outside sources to shut our grid down. This system was never encrypted, nor designed to keep experts out. - George Grindley [State Representative, District 35, Marietta, Georgia]

See the recent revelations (words from on high) that "Monkey-See, Monkey-Do County" (Montgomery County, Maryland) has discovered that, Surprise!!!!, they're having Y2K problems. These problems include early failures caused by date lookaheads.... in their permits systems, financial systems problems, as well as a fun problem in their phone system. Recall that "Monkey-See, Monkey-Do County" brayed on 60 Minutes that they were done, DONE, and the best in the nation by any measure. They demo'ed a part of their testing, Look-look, we rolled the traffic signal computers forward and the cars are not skidding out of control. Now that the best-prepared county in the U.S. has fallen on its face, what about everyone else? What is really going on? What's gone on is that the gasbags who control the budgets have won and everyone else has lost. Oddly enough, Monkey County probably IS ahead of the pack. They've spent tens of millions of dollars, I have a long time pal who has wormed his way into their Y2K work and is billing the bucks, laughing every day, he's got a wheelbarrow for hauling the cash to his Mercedes. It's like Dilbert says, management is nature's way of removing the idiots from the productive stream. The idiots have taken over, decided that there isn't a Y2K problem, and if there is, it can be solved by decisive rhetoric, a firm stance, and by Thor, those programmers aren't going to earn a decent living (a little more than what a plumber or automatic transmission mechanic bills.) Too bad, the idiots won, the work didn't get done..... What would it have taken? What should have been done? Y2K fixes should have been a priority. The programs run by people who know something about computers, risk, the business. Cost should not have been the driver. They should have been told, make it so. Instead the general case was a lackadaisical effort with cost-containment as the priority. A secondary consideration was cronyism, alignment with the party line, political slipperyness. So here we are, 182 days to go [on July 2], the trolls, denialists, and buttheads still churning strong.... The big clue, I'm typing slow so the pollys can keep up, is that the administrators, bureaucrats, risk managers, are far more doomer than the c.s.y2k [Internet newsgroup] doomers are. Not by their words but by their deeds.... The big clue is that they know that things will fail. They know it because the work hasn't been done. - Cory Hamasaki

Most economists believe [the Y2K problem] will be a non-event because they think contingency planning will cushion the effect and that the problems will be rapidly accessed and fixed. I just don't buy into that. - Ed Yardeni

We're doomed, domed I tell ye... - Andy

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), August 08, 1999

Answers

Ooops, well, London will be domed... :)

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), August 08, 1999.

All New Readers: Please Note...

The 'scary quote' by worried utility worker was a bogus posting by someone named Stephen Poole.

He confessed to posting this false information in an attempt to show how gullible people are.

[Andy: An irresponsible post on your part. Go to your room... and no tabloids for one week.]

-- PNG (Peter Gauthier) (png@gol.com), August 08, 1999.

Actually Peter I got these from Nick at the Contrarian Investor - pretty irresponsible of poole or whatever bogus name he lurks under these days to post such tripe. Such is life (pond life anyway...)

BTW the Contrarian Investor is a great monthly read - next issue is Sept. 30th - see other current thread for details.

I will self-immolate my testicles now Peter in reparation for posting pooles' BS...

-- andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), August 08, 1999.

Ouch.

Stephen Poole deserved a solar flare for that one...

-- PNG (Peter Gauthier) (png@gol.com), August 08, 1999.

Andy,

I think Poole's BS story was spread about the time you were on leave from the forum. Not quite sure but so far you and Peter have given me a good laugh way too early on a Sunday morning! : )

I think Poole deserved a solar flare, A Tsunami, two earthquakes and an asteroid on a collision with his brain (if he wasn't sitting on it) for being such a jerk!!!

Mike

==================================================================

-- Michael Taylor (mtdesign3@aol.com), August 08, 1999.

Just goes to show you that ANDY will believe just about any news, so long as it is BAD news.

What a moron

-- (Whacky @ little. Doomers), August 08, 1999.

Being able to verify such quotes is important. As you've seen both from government and other less reputable source, 'information' is quite easily manufactured. Remember the forged letter from 'Cadillac' last year? The supposed quote from Henry Kissinger (as far as I know this was quote in one British tabloid and remains unverified)?

Those of us who advocate preparedness do have a responsibility to verify as much as possible and at a minimum, point to the source of the information we provide.

One of the main reasons I held onto the Alliant Energy internal memo for 2 weeks before I published it here was because I wanted to speak with additional Alliant employees who could verify that they had also seen the memo.

-- Arnie Rimmer (Arnie_Rimmer@usa.net), August 08, 1999.

pooles mistake

A Public Demand for a Public Apology from Stephen M. Poole -- Lane Core Jr.

-- (poole@indeep.???), August 08, 1999.

Thanks for the Lane Core link :)

And Whacky, does that refer to your five-finger shuffle pastime?

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), August 08, 1999.

Mike,

An asteroid on a collision course with his brain? Uhhhh, don't you mean a hemmoroid on a collision course with his brain? Unless you meant an ass-teroid!

-- Gordon (gpconnolly@aol.com), August 08, 1999.

Andy,

Insulting me isn't going to make you look like any less of an ass. Face it Doomlit, you've been had. And by none other than Mr. Poole himself... oh the IRONY must be killing you.. LOL!

I am enjoying seeing you exposed for the chucklehead you are. If you want to continue to insult me that's fine, have at it. But again, you weren't astute enough to research your own posts so I guess no matter how much you rant and rave you'll always be a pitful little Doombrooder. Maybe you can take some of that gold you've been hoarding and buy yourself a clue.

regards,

Polly A. Ester

-- (Whacky as in Loopy, @ Crazy. Pathetic Doom Troopers), August 08, 1999.

Decker,

Hint:

When you post under an ass-umed name try to change the style a little. Oh, and change "Regards" to something else too.

-- Polly Out (spray aw@y.those pollys.with one shot), August 08, 1999.

Andy,

I'm sorry for calling you names. Please accept my humble apologies and allow me to add this really scary quote from Our Man Flint to your list:

"If it turns out that 10,000 deaths can be attributed directly to y2k failures, then we got away pretty damn clean...If we're talking about 10,000 deaths, that's in the noise of ordinary mortality rates, and isn't significant...And really, what IS a serious consequence? As far as I'm concerned, the aliens could abduct all of Southern California, smog and all, and never return it and we'd probably be better off." ---Flint, August 08, 1999 TB2000

regards,

Polly A. Ester

-- (Whacky Troll, @ Rude. Little Dude), August 08, 1999.

And Poole continues to prove the point months after he did his experiment. Poole was right and everyone fell for it. Even old Gary "This is end of the world guess # 12" North fell for it.

-- MrWayCool (Poolestillprovingthepoint@hahaha.com), August 08, 1999.

Mr. WayKewl (party on Garth dood),

Perhaps you could get your facts straight. Mr. Cess Poole's possibly dangerous hoax was debunked on this very board within 10 minutes of him posting it.

-- (factsfinder@home.com), August 08, 1999.

italics off

-- Dan G (thepcguru@hotmail.com), August 09, 1999.