Y2K in Y2K3
I spent the day scuba diving at the Los
Coronados Islands, in Mexican waters south of San
Diego (here's
what it looked like, and yes, I saw lots of them).
If I feel inspired, I'll write up the
experience in the morning for my Sunday column. As
for today, however, I'm exhausted, so I'll use
today as my "rerun
day" for the month of April. Here's a little
humor I wrote back in 1999, when Y2K captured
everyone's imaginations. This was published on
Year2000.com,
one of the leading informational sites responding
to the computer "crisis" at the time.
· · ·
Y2K is the "Ctrl-Alt-Del" of
the Information Age
I’m starting to think this Millennium Bug
crisis could be a good thing.
Today I sat on hold for an eternity while I
fought to make a claim with my home warranty
company. Later in the day, I met an employee of a
major overnight package carrier who would not
accept my letter because it was one minute past her
closing time. And in going through my mail this
evening, I found a past-due "delinquent" notice
from my long-distance phone company that had been
sent on the exact same date as the original
bill.
We’ve all had days like this, when the
bureaucracy of our society threatens to swallow us
whole. We’ve all felt the futility of trying
to correct clerical errors with a giant corporation
when we have to talk to a different anonymous
representative every time we call. And none of us
can go away for more than a couple of days without
having our mailbox overflow with useless,
unsolicited junk mail.
And, like global warming and pop music,
it’s only getting worse. Minor yet annoying
mistakes on utility bills and bank statements are
becoming increasingly common. Yet when we try to
correct them, we have to navigate a touch-tone
customer service labyrinth—only to end up
waiting on hold for ten minutes. And don’t
even try to correct the problem by writing a
letter; you won’t get a response for four
months, if you even get one at all.
If our lives were computers, then Windows would
be the perfect metaphor for our society. Those
incomprehensible error messages that pop up
unexpectedly would symbolize the phone company
trying to explain those arcane new fees and
surcharges. Those excruciating delays when your
system freezes up for no reason would represent the
interminable hours you wait on hold, listening to a
recording telling you what a "valued customer" you
are. And the dreaded "blue screen of death," where
the only solution is to shut down and restart,
would epitomize the Millennium Bug. Maybe
that’s what our frenetic, bureaucratic,
computerized society needs: the "Ctrl-Alt-Del" of
Y2K.
I don’t want the numbers in my bank account
to roll over to zeros along with the numbers on the
clock. Nor do I want to move to a ranch in the
Ozarks to escape rioting gangs of looters. But
I’m beginning to wonder whether the
"rebooting" of our society is a kind of poetic
justice in this Age of Information-Overload.
When the ball falls in Times Square next year,
and the double-nines in millions of lines of code
turn into double-zeros, will civilization as we
know it really cease to exist? Will we really wake
up on January 1, 2000, to a quiet, calm, dark
world? Will those pesky touch-tone customer service
menus really be silenced for good?
No one knows for sure, but at least we can
hope.
Development note: I've
noticed that this site doesn't look like it should
in Netscape Navigator. Rather than waste time
jury-rigging it to look right in a
soon-to-be-obsolete browser, I'll just add the
cliché "This site best viewed with Internet
Explorer."
©2003 Michael
Strickland ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED
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