What Y2K problem? Army engineer corps asks

By K. JACKSON ANDERSON Herald Writer

What if the world threw a crisis and nobody came?

That's the message from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

There are less than 250 days left until the "the nonevent of our lives," said Marney Mason, Y2K project manager for the Corps' Seattle district, which operates three Pacific Northwest hydroelectric dams.

The criteria? Nothing has happened yet.

According to Y2K experts, the millennium computer glitch was first expected to cause trouble last year, when air travel reservations and software projecting market trends began to compute with dates in the year 2000.

It didn't happen.

The European conversion to the euro was supposed to be a precursor of the types of trouble banks may face with Y2K.

The conversion was completed in two days, without incident, the Corps said.

Enter 1999, when on April 1 the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada and a plethora of other entities, including New York City, were to tiptoe into Y2K as they changed to fiscal year 2000.

No problems were reported.

On April 9, the first "artificial date" computer systems were predicted to give up in droves because in the Julian calendar, that date translates to 9999, computerese for "end of file," a type of techno bye-bye.

Yet April 9 came and went.

"Do you think the doomsayers may be wrong?" asked Mason. "Why is it possible, less than one year from the end of the world as we know it, to buy a two-year subscription to newsletters and magazines sponsored by those who are predicting the downfall of civilization?"

Even so, don't pour that dried food down the garbage disposal quite yet.

The Corps urges everyone to prepare "for whatever problems might befall you and your families, regardless of Y2K."

To the Corps, that more typically means a winter storm.

-- Y2K Pro (2@641.com), April 30, 1999

Answers

Doesn't Paulyanna Davis work for these clowns???

-- Pollyslayer (pollys@clue.less), April 30, 1999.

I hope the damn IRS shares the same attitude. Stop remediation on all IRS computers now! There's no such thing as Y2K!

-- Doug (Doug@work.now), April 30, 1999.

what's that famos oxy-moron?...military-inteligence?

-- zoobie (zoobie@zoob.zab), April 30, 1999.

Remember the tale of The Boy Who Cried "Wolf"?

At the end of the story, the wolf was really there.

-- No Spam Please (No_Spam_Please@anon_ymous.com), April 30, 1999.

Darn - almost one trillion dollars wasted. Well, I guess everybody who spent all that money fixing a non-existent problem is gonna get fired.

Or everybody who spent the money si going to be in business, refuisng to hire the ones who didn't fix it. Hope this writer accepts responsibility for anyone convinced through this story that they need not prepare.

The words, by the way, are from the "official government Y2K press release" handbook - this writer didn't come up with any of these: other thatn "Don't pour that dried food down the garbage dsposal yet."

And I thought Y2KP claimed he never was going to tell soembody not to prepare.

-- Robert A. Cook, PE (Kennesaw, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), April 30, 1999.