German Opera Hit by Y2K Breakdown

.c The Associated Press

BERLIN (AP) - It was almost as though Richard Wagner had come back to life.

When Berlin's German Opera ran its payroll for the first time this year, the millennium bug caused havoc by setting the date back to 1900, an official said Wednesday.

Staff at the Deutsche Oper - which is known for staging 19th-century classics - discovered that the software problem wiped out government subsidies for families with children by wrongly computing children's ages.

Suddenly, the payroll program would treat a person born in 1990 as 90 years old and automatically stop the child allowance, said Heinz-Dieter Sense, the opera's financial manager.

``Everything was year 2000-proof - except for this isolated item,'' he said in a telephone interview. ``Of course, we hadn't checked every single line of the software.''

Then again, the opera was uneasy about withholding government-mandated benefits. So its accountants tricked the software by resetting it to December 1999, before calling in programmers to repair the problem for next month's payroll.

Still, staffers came up $10.50 short because child benefits increased as of Jan. 1. The amount will be included in February paychecks, Sense said.

``It's an unpleasant problem, but it is limited in scope,'' he said. ``Our employees were not that terribly upset.''

AP-NY-01-12-00 0922EST

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-- Cyndi Crowder (cyncrowder@aol.com), January 12, 2000