In the mid Seventies the Oil companies faced their own Y2K crisis, millions of gas stations had two-digit price meters that weren't going to do the job of making lots of money for the refineries when the price of gasoline topped $1.00/gallon. They went about the task of replacing the meters or the whole pump in every last station in time for the rising prices. I recall that they were daunted at the task but somehow it got done. Good old greed went to work, solved the problem in record time and surprised us all. So why can't it work here? The original idea, you'll recall, was to replace two-digit-year machines with new machinery and it still holds as the best idea. Okay so it would cost a fortune but greed and a deadline will pull us through as always. Fixing ancient computers is nuts, the system needs replaced. We also need to dust off the old 10-key and do some old-fashioned accounting if the computer can't do it. We've become too dependant on computers, whatever THEY are. This isn't a Y2K problem, it is an attitude problem, we've gotten lazy and dependant on machines to do our work and think for us. Remember the line in Top Gun, "In WWII our kill ratio was eleven to one, in Korea it had fallen to one-to-one, we had gotten dependant on missiles"...and nearly lost the war. Well, it has happend again, with computers. We stand to lose the Y2K war if we don't relearn basic bookkeeping skills. Brian in UT

-- Anonymous, January 20, 1998

Answers

Sound like what you're advocating, Brian, is contingency planning. That's exactly where I feel the bulk of the effort needs to be made at this point - not only in the electric utilities sector, but all private industry and government. Contingency planning in and of itself is going to take some time.

There's a problem, though. As you point out, those skills needed to do a lot of the tasks 'manually' no longer exist. Automation resulted in a lot of downsizing (read: layoffs) in all sectors in the last decade or so. If these operations and tasks are going to have to be performed manually, then I fear that a lot of it will be 'on the job training' after 01 Jan 2000.

-- Anonymous, January 21, 1998

I think you are lost on the scale of this thing. Gas pumps seem like a nice comparison, but it just isn't in the same boat. More accurate to say that the petrol industry just found that it had two years to replace every valve in every refinery, oil field, pumping station, pipeline, gas station, truck, rail car and other facility. All this because an estimated 5% were certain to fail in the same week two years from now.

Greed and fear are wonderful motivators, but all the greed in the world would not prevent the sun from rising tomorrow. 2+2=4 no matter how hard we might wish it didn't.

-- Anonymous, January 21, 1998

The gas-pump problem was a "two-digit problem"; so is y2k. Y2k is a huge problem, but replacing all of the gas pumps was a huge problem as well. The gas pump problem was solved in time, and therefore y2k can be solved in time as well.

That seems to be the logic. The analogy would have merit if the gas-pumps at each station had had a different design--either done by outside gas-pump consultants or in-house gas-pump departments--and if each of these designs had interacted with other gas-station systems in a manner unique to that station. Of course, that was not the case. Gas-pumps are simple devices, basically one size fits all. The design modification was trivial. That was not the challenge. The challenge was manufacturing/distributing them quickly enough. The challenge was met: The U.S., in particular, has shown itself to be good at meeting manufactuaring challenges (see WW II).

In short, the gas-pump problem was a manufacturing/distribution problem; y2k is not. The latter is a design problem--actually, hundreds of thousands of different design problems. That makes the two problems quite different, IMHO.

Best, Wade

PS: Brian, the kill-ration in the Gulf War--the most computerized war ever--was much higer than 11 to 1.

-- Anonymous, January 23, 1998

Another thought to add to Wade's:

When gas pumps had to be changed out because of digit problems, it did not affect the basic functionality of the pumps. Even though the pumps only handled two digits, I remember seeing handwritten "1"'s being taped onto the left hand side of the pump next to the price window. The gas jockeys had to do a bit of mental gymnastics to calculate the prices, but that didn't stop the pumps from working.

-- Anonymous, January 23, 1998