It's a little thing, but I can't help thinking about global ramifications. Yesterday, I was trying to close out some month-end data. Most of the month was missing. I went to the guy who designed the program, thank God he's in-house, and asked him to look for the problem. Seems he put the Y2K compliant version online on November 9th. When we got to the monthly summary, he forgot to ask it to look for files containing "both" the 2-digit and 4-digit date codes. Simple little error on a simple little program. How often will something like that happen?

BTW, he's very unhappy, our program is Excel-based, about how the product reads the date. Seems he has to go in and insert a pivot to change centuries. He's basing it on "90". He'll be dead in 2089. Somebody else's problem. Based on that, how long will some of these fixes last?

Yeah, I'm concerned. Even if we get it all fixed, it has the potential to be really messed up.

-- margie mason (mar3mike@aol.com), December 08, 1998

Answers

Margie,

Yes, you got it. There will be (heck ... already are!) lots of little glitches like that all over the place in changed-for-Y2K programs.

-- No Spam Please (anon@ymous.com), December 09, 1998.

It's starting.

-- Robert A. Cook, P.E. (Kennesaw, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), December 10, 1998.