The NEW spin - if something goes wrong, don't automatically assume its Y2K related....

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We can expect to be hearing this spin a lot more i.e. if your ATM is out new years morning, don't automatically assume its Y2K. Or if your pacemaker fails, or if your car won't start. It could just be a really bad hair day.....

-- kii (so@long.fornow), November 15, 1999

Answers

Actually, there are a LOT of failures that aren't Y2K related. But a lot of folks are trying to say that the (insert current) problem isn't Y2K related, when a Y2K fix has just been installed, and now the software is performing erratically...

-- Mad Monk (madmonk@hawaiian.net), November 15, 1999.

My guess is that problems (to some degree or another) will be so wide spread that this spin won't work after roll-over.

I think, right now, the government is hoping this kind of spin will work. After the roll-over, they will have to decide if they can make it work at the risk of losing the public trust. In an unstable environment, a loss of public trust would be bad. Very bad.

-- Pete (pberry1_98@yahoo.com), November 15, 1999.


I can attest to that. In my local small town weekly paper the chief of police was reassuring folks throughout the area that the infrastructure is okay and the city computers ready. The only problem, he said, was likely to be people who chalked up "normal" breakdowns to Y2K and then cause a panic. "Don't worry. Everything will be fine." IOW, "You can all go back to sleep now..."

-- JER (I_get_it@this.time), November 15, 1999.

It might be a very hard sell for anybody - even higly paid government spin pros - - to convince enough people that any failure - Y2K related or not is not!!!

-- Living in (the@real.world), November 15, 1999.

And if your local chemical plant discharges toxic clouds of gas, assume it is one of the 5% failures that happen every day.

-- squid (itsdark@down.here), November 15, 1999.


The challenge will be to address at the same time the normal failures COMBINED WITH and interacting with the Y2K-related failures.

What sense does it make to spend alot of time trying to figure out which is which? Aren't there more productive and important ways to use our time, energies, and resources?

Surely, the challenge is not to tally up those failures that can be readily validated as being Y2K-related. We are not engaged in some kind of wager to see how many Y2K-related failures occur. What point or purpose would it serve to effectively focus on identifying and assessing the nature of the failures? It might have some historical interest, but shouldn't our time and efforts be spent on dealing with the failures and threats of failures that are facing us?

Many of us have become quite adept at analyzing things. Indeed many of us seem to have an extraordinary penchant for assessing problems before they happen and assessing them after they happen while paying little attention to actually taking action to do anything about the problems.

Y2K efforts have focused so much on information gathering and assessment that everyone seems to have forgotten the purpose of collecting information and making assessments: TO INFORM ACTION. WHERE IS THE ACTION?

Perhaps we need to consider another approach rather than focusing on information gathering, analysis, and assessment as if these were ends in themselves. Perhaps we need to simply plan on taking action to minimize the number of problems that occur, based on quick and running assessments of what is occurring.

We are about to have a convergence of problem threads. Some of the problem threads will be Y2K-related and some will be non-Y2K-related. Some might even been terrorist-related. What point or purpose does it serve to sort them out carefully before taking action to address them?

The challenge is to respond to the cumulative challenges the best we can and get through this using all the ingenuity, intelligence, and humanity that we can muster. By taking such an approach, we would have a greater likelihood of minimizing human pain and suffering, minimizing economic instability, minimizing environmental impacts, and keeping the social fabric from coming apart for we would be focusing the majority of our efforts on addressing the problems that occur. Now is not the time to play the role of the photographer at an accident, disaster, or catastrophe ~ whatever it turns out to be. We need to turn our attention to both minimizing the chances of accidents, disasters, or catastrophes that could occur while also addressing those which have occurred inspite of our best efforts.

-- Paula Gordon (pgordon@erols.com), November 16, 1999.


This isn't necessarily bad advice. A lot of problems WON'T be Y2K related, so we don't want the DGI's panicking if it IS a BITR. If it's not a BITR, then we'll ALL find out soon enough.

-- Colin MacDonald (roborogerborg@yahoo.com), November 16, 1999.

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