Art Bell tonight: major IT failure? who?

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Tonight on Art Bell, was notified about a MAJOR IT failure; he called Gary North (who will not appear again on Art Bell_ and discussed this apparent big news. At the top of the hour, ABC news annouced a major Y2K-related Medicaid and AFDC failures.

Any thoughts?

-- nemo (noname@thistime.com), December 17, 1999

Answers

I guess my foodstamps will be late next month.

-- Satanta (GoingHungry@intNoFun.com), December 17, 1999.

Muss be dat "0.1%" we been hearin' 'bout.

Night train

-- bemused ol footballer (nighttr@in.lane), December 17, 1999.


It's been over 6 hours since this was posted, and I find no mention on any of the wires, or abcnews.com.

-- Steve (hartsman@ticon.net), December 17, 1999.

If you will go to the Art Bell Radio Show's audio archives for Thu/Fri 12/16==12/17 at this URL:

http://ww2.broadcast.com/artbell/dec99.stm

Click on Thur/Fri morning.... it will bring up Real Audio File for that show. The particular item is mentioned at 40 minutes exactly into the 1st Hour of the show. He only mentioned it for about a minute before discussing Gary North. I'll relay as best as my notes could take it down...

A Mainstream News Reporter had called Art earlier on Thur Afternoon to say that he had a source indicating that there had been a massive or large failure of a nationwide computer system for a certain agency. Art said he then got a hold of Gary North to assist in trying to confirm or refute the story. Art said that after some checking he and GN were able to get what they thought was a partial verification but Art reported that GN was thinking that something smelled rotten about the story but was not quite sure. So, until they can get verification they will not provide any further information.

That is about as much as was said...other than Art went on to say that he asked Gary if he wanted to come back on the show next week to talk about it and Y2K in general. At first GN agreed but later called back to say that really people's minds were made up and that coming back on the air would not change any minds or really help in any way so why bother.

This reminds me of the same argument given by Mr. CEO to Jim Lord as a reason not to come on another talk show recently.

That's about it... Art went on to discuss other things. Nothing was ever stated (that I picked up) about a network source. He did mention another radio network or station in regards to a different story earlier. That may be where the confusion came in.

Hope that helps answer your question.

-- Dick Moody (dickmoody@yahoo.com), December 17, 1999.


FWIW< had Mr. CEO appeared on the air then his firm would have potentially lost all their contracts. I think Mr. CEO would have accepted the financial loss.

The loss of his contracts would mean that his teams would not be working after rollover, so repairs would move MUCH slower if at all. I believe Mr. CEO did a probable head count of potential lives lost, and chose the road which minimizes deaths at this point in time.

I do not envy him having to make that decision.

I mention this only cause I haven't seen it elsewhere.

And I support GN's reason for not appearing. No one can acuse him of being a media hound, his decisions, that I am aware of, have consistntly been altruistic.

-- Hokie (nn@va.com), December 17, 1999.



And next months guests on Art bell are still arriving in 1900...maybe that's the "major failure" he mentioned.

-- Uncle Bob (UNCLB0B@AOL.COM), December 17, 1999.

I heard that too, and I could have sworn he said that it was a government agency.

-- soapie (soapie@suds.com), December 17, 1999.

Well, it's been 24 hours and nothing on the wires. Frankly, I'm thinking this is simply a misunderstanding. Medicaid and AFDC are two of the Federal programs that are still being worked on, so they are certainly good candidate for failures, but there's been no real news in that regard. It may be that the comment was that failures are "likely" or "almost guaranteed" and it got misconstrued.

-- Mac (sneak@lurk.hid), December 18, 1999.

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