I've watched this area for a few months now and decided the time has come to post this. This is for "doomers" and "pollys" both. I am an executive with an IT firm. There are going to be problems, no doubt. Some will be of a serious nature. Problems in other countries will affect us. Not just on 1/1/00 but throughout the next year because of supply chain failures. Now I'm going to lay part of the blame. Some if not many of these problems are YOUR fault. PCs, which are an important tool to the success of your business have become a commodity based on nothing more than price and speed in almost every case. This price pressure has cascaded throughout IT organizations. Hire the cheapest contract coders, buy the cheapest PCs, Don't hire professional consultants to implement a new system, and on and on. I've personally seen to many small businesses (some with more than 2000 pcs) who aren't doing what they really should be doing. How many of you who have worked on a Y2K project have seen a decent test bed? Not many. Don't tell me you have because I've been in this business to long and I've seen to much. Must Y2K testing comes from a document off of the Internet. It's the truth. I could go on but I won't. Those of you in the business know exactly what I'm talking about. How bad will it be? It doesn't matter. We will fix things. This is the same country that went from the depths of depression to building airplanes in a matter of hours, and war ships in a matter of weeks. There are to many of us around today who have the will power and the intelligence to let it all go to hell. If you want advice, prepare. Prepare to the level you can reasonably afford, without bankrupting yourself. Don't go into debt. All debts are reckoned all the time. Prepare your mind. People have lived thier entire lives through horrors you cannot imagine. Believe in yourself, act prudently and you will survive and prevail. I hope this wasn't to windy for you. And I apologize for the frankness, but the BS just gets a little to deep sometimes. One last message for the Polly's, If you are really so confident why are you here?

-- Roark (not@now.com), September 27, 1999

Answers

I'm a Systems Engineer supporting automation and process control for a fortune 500 manufacturer. Part of my job is Y2k testing of factory floor systems. We're not a large shop. We're one of 66 plants worldwide. I tested 36 systems using a manual method. Let date rollover in bios - softboot and hardboot to see if it held. Date tested DOS same way. Also checked 2/29/00 for rollover. Ran applications with new date. I had 10 systems fail. I have spent $205,000 to fix these problems. One failure was an SPC package that would not do correct math across years. One was an HVAC application that shutdown our entire plant environment control. We are a JIT plant with parts coming from Korea and Mexico. We've had it!

-- pdp11 (vaxvms@dec.com), September 27, 1999.

Thanks for the post. I am one of those folks who know how to make things work. No matter how bad it gets we will be back, and fairly quickly too. Sure there may be changes, sometimes change is good. The folks in the city will have it worst. The city mentality of "me first" and if the elect goes off its shopping spree time will cause a lot of heartache. Us country folk already have plans to keep the machinery running and can do without most conveniances. We're not afraid of the dark and if we had no electricity we'd simply go to bed earlier. Y2K may be the end of the world for some people, but hey, people get killed everyday. That's life. Wringing our hands won't change anything. Sorry for the rant. I usually just lurk.

-- dozerdoctor (dozerdoc@yahoo.com), September 27, 1999.

Thanks for the follow up dozer. We are not alone. You made my day.

-- roark (not@now.com), September 27, 1999.

pdp11... those little glitches you found... they were fixed within 3 days, right?

Roark..."This price pressure has cascaded throughout IT organizations. Hire the cheapest contract coders, buy the cheapest PCs, Don't hire professional consultants to implement a new system, and on and on."

That price pressure has not hit JUST IT organizations. Every industry has been pressured to downsize and outsource until those who KNOW how to fix and workaround have been shoved aside. That's just one layer of the onion of Y2K, and why it will NOT be fixed in 3 days. We have chosen to replace expensive knowledge with cheap labor. Greed over loyalty. Short term profits over the long term view. Stealing present profits from future needs. Time to pay our collective dues.

-- Linda (lwmb@psln.com), September 28, 1999.

Linda...

We started our process in mid '98. We still have one system left to remediate. This will be done by Oct 15. We have now been requested by Corporate to provide a contingency plan. It is a joke. Without outside suppliers we are toast. 350 people will go home. We use over 100 parts in our product - just one missing will stop production. They don't care what we say as long as they can tell their investors and customers that we have a plan. Smoke and mirrors. My company as a whole has spent 16 million on this problem - it is real.

-- pdp11 (vaxvms@dec.com), September 28, 1999.

>> No matter how bad it gets we will be back, and fairly quickly too. <<

If all it took were ability, then I agree that we'll come back quickly. The trouble with that scenario is debt. Debt means that a fairly large part of any work we do in the future will be earmarked to pay back the money we spent in happier days. It's like taking half your effort and throwing it down a deep hole that needs to be filled up before you can apply yourself to addressing your present needs.

Sometimes I hear people say that all we need to do is declare personal bankruptcy and default on the national debt. Not a good idea. When people or businesses declare bankruptcy then everyone they owed money to takes a loss. As the losses mount up, more people and businesses are dragged into bankruptcy. Ruined businesses close up shop and throw their employees out of work, creating even more debt defaults. As the default process proceeds the innocent are slaughtered along with the guilty.

In such an dire atmosphere Americans have learned to turn to their government for help. If we default on the national debt, don't look there. The government will be helpless. We'd all be starting from scratch, no matter how much wealth or savings we had before. The war between the haves and have-nots would escalate in no time. Where it would end is anyone's guess.

As Roark said: All debts are reckoned all the time.

-- Brian McLaughlin (brianm@ims.com), September 28, 1999.