I spent the past week or so on business in Nashville, Tennessee, and noticed two things that may be of interest:

1. Wherever you go in the older parts of the city, you can smell vile sewage odors from the storm drains. It seems to be an old and vulnerable sewage system.

2. I bought gasoline from a local area gas station chain shop and noticed that they used ancient computers (286's? 386's?) with small monochrome monitors to process the transaction. My receipt showed the date in two-digit format.

Just a couple of observations.

-- cody varian (cody@Y2ksurvive.com), October 30, 1999

Answers

If everyone would bother to look this week, they would find similar results. I do PC reparis/upgrades and the world still runs on a LOT of older PCs and software.
But -what the hell- we can do it all by hand ...

-- Dan G (thepcguru@hotmail.com), October 31, 1999.

And besides, anything that REALLY needs fixing...

Can be fixed in oh, two or three hours, right?

I think we are going to be very busy fixing things and fixing things and fixing things. Oh well, you get the idea.

-- snooze button (alarmclock_2000@yahoo.com), October 31, 1999.

DanG,

Yes, I do PC repair/upgrades and 95% of the stuff that comes in has done nothing regarding y2k. The 5% that has done any kinds of BIOS/RTC checkup has done almost nothing for other things like operating system fixes or apps updates.

People are getting the Y2k disc from Microsoft for Y2k and are asking me if they should install it. Three people have had problems after doing the upgrades and alot of the people who got the disk wont do the upgrade until late in December.

Went to a local RadioShack to get some power supply fans and mentioned Y2k dates affecting consumer electronic goods and the goofball behind the counter said "Dont worry about it, its all hype". This from a guy selling electronics.

-- hamster (hamster@mycage.com), October 31, 1999.