yesterday, january 4th, my husband navigated through the snowdrifts to get to the office (we live in northern indiana). he got frantic phone calls from 2 clients with accounting problems. after they explained their problems, he told them they were experiencing the "jo anne" effect, and told them how to do a temporary fix, which worked (look ahead 9 months instead of 12). they then asked why he hadn't warned them of the problem. he said, " 3 letters, 2 phone calls, my newsletter, AND a december special weren't enough to convince you?" guess what, they signed up for the december special at the (higher) january price. i'm sure there will be others who will find a problem as soon as they are able to get to the office; many businesses were closed yesterday due to the snow emergency.

-- jocelyne slough (jonslough@tln.net), January 05, 1999

Answers

Another (albeit small) example:

I was in attendance as guest speaker on the Y2k issue at a City Council board meeting for a nearby community. One of the board members is a pharmacist. During my presentation, he added an interesting comment. He mentioned that late in the morning a one-year prescription had been entered into the clinic pharmacy computer. It had an expiration date early in January, 2000. He said that the 2000 date "crashed their computer program and trashed the data base so badly that they had to call the software manufacturer to help get it going again". The pharmacist said it took the rest of the day to recover the data. (Yes .. they were backed up, but there was about 4 hours' worth of new data entered that wasn't on the backup tapes.)

He concluded with an interesting comment. He said that their pharmacy software had been "guaranteed to be year 2000 ready" by the vendor and that they had assured him that it had been "thoroughly tested". When he presented the vendor with the situation that crashed their pharmacy data base .. the vendor replied .. "oh .. we didn't think of that".

They promised him that a fix was "on the way".

Nuff sed.

-- Dan (DanTCC@Yahoo.com), January 05, 1999.

on the pharmacy problem, you do have any references for that? thanks s

-- Sharon Schultz (shalom100@aol.com), January 05, 1999.

Hi Sharon! Happy reading ;)

Company Erroneously Denies Federal Workers' Drug Benefits

xxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxx

-- Leska (allaha@earthlink.net), January 05, 1999.

Leska:

The story you referenced is unrelated to Y2K. Interesting read nonetheless.

-- Steve Hartsman (hartsman@ticon.net), January 05, 1999.

Steve,

Off the topic, but have you read the Milwaukee Journal recently? Press clippings posted some articles from the Journal. Police stations are getting back-up generators and they are planning emergency shelters.

-- Dave (dave22@concentric.net), January 05, 1999.

Steve - It doesn't seem entirely unrelated, as it is definitely a date field processing error. Not strictly a JAE (Jo Anne Effect) event, but close enough for (literally) government work. System failed to handle year-end update to set expiration dates to 12/31/1999. Approximately 100,000 people affected. Official says no one seriously impacted. Would prefer to also see interviews with customers to hear whether they agree.

-- Mac (sneak@lurk.com), January 05, 1999.

A software package on our Unix computer system had a "JoAnne" effect.

Our support department fixes Unix and NT based software for a major software company.

The product we were using, SCCS, refused to allow the software patch to be checked in, due to some date-related (1999) problem. Luckily, the vendor was on top of things, already had a patch available (from a month ago), we were able to apply the patch and check in our software patch. It's also possible that our MIS people were lying to us and simply allowed the license to expire and had to apply the new license, but that's not what they said.

Reputable software companies will probably be issuing patches like crazy from now until the 3rd quarter of 1999. After that, the problems may be so overwhelming that their staff will be heading for the farmlands.

I'd be in contact with your software companies for Y2K patch updates, at least for a few more months. When the company's support people bail, then it's time.

That's probably the best barometer for how bad Y2K will be... If by September, Microsoft, Sun and IBM are hiring like crazy, then you know it will be time to move off to your little farm community.

Glen Austin

-- Glen Austin (gdaustin@aol.com), January 06, 1999.