Leaving no stone unturned in efforts to calm Americans' fears about Y2K, the Y2K Conversion Council Monday released a "failure fact sheet" designed to show that failures across a broad spectrum are normal.

The resulting story in the Dallas Morning News points out failure and error rates for such as ATMs, credit transactions traffic signal malfunctions and airline delays.

The subtle message, of course, is intended to reinforce the positive spin of the past few months; another layer, so to speak.

Link
-- Vic (Rdrunner@internetwork.net), December 14, 1999

Answers

"No fear folks. We anticipated the mushroom cloud and if you think reeeeeal hard, it IS a normal occurrance, ya know". LOL ! I crack myself up !!! Just having some fun with this thread.

-- Rob (maxovrdrv51@hotmail.com), December 14, 1999.

Also see thread below:

President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion Sector Benchmarks

For the text from the President's Council

-- (pshannon@inch.com), December 14, 1999.

At last! A scorecard! The Usual Inconveniences

Under normal circumstances, 1 to 2 percent of ATMs are down because of breakdowns or because they ran out of cash.

About 8 to 10 percent of the time, a customer experiences failure on the first attempt at an ATM, typically because of user error.

About 10 percent of credit transactions fail routinely because of equipment breakdowns, credit limits or user error.

Each year, U.S. customers experience about 13 hours of power failure, not including the effects of major storms.

On a normal day, less than 1 percent of traffic signals turn to flashing. On a bad day, the number may increase to 1 percent.

An average of 424 commercial flights have been delayed 15 minutes or more on the last five New Year's days.

So if any of these breakdowns or delays is worse than delineated above, I take it we can say it's probably Y2K-related.

-- Old Git (anon@spamproblems.com), December 14, 1999.

The story mentions that they tested the computers in their Whimper Locus (Command Center) Friday, and the results apparently weren't real good ("ran slowly") but it's now fixed. Kosky says they've "tested and retested" the system, and now it's good to go.

Great. We're gonna track the rollover in a newly computerized office, which was not running two working days ago. How many "retests" can you fit in in two working days? Not to worry, we've still got 411 hours.

Here's a clue, guys: whiteboard and markers.

-- bw (home@puget.sound), December 14, 1999.

I am 38 years old. Never once in my life have I experienced an outage Dec 31 or Jan 1 of anything. The odds of it are so low as to not even be considered. One thing goes wrong in my life, based on my lifelong experience, and I will KNOW for a fact it is broken code or malfunctioning Y2K related chips.

-- Paula (chowbabe@pacbell.net), December 14, 1999.

Failures are normal, just look at the public school system...LOL

-- CygnusXI (noburnt@toast.net), December 14, 1999.

From: Y2K, ` la Carte by Dancr (pic), near Monterey, California

These numbers seem unbelievably high. I suppose they must have estimated them at the highest possible numbers as they thought they could get away with.

My bank has a set of four ATMs outside. I've never seen any of them marked as "out of order", here, or at any previous bank. I've never heard of anyone else having trouble with an ATM being down. My only bad experience with an ATM (a year or two ago) was that it malfunctioned. I've never experienced a "user error" failure. My son did the first time I allowed him to try it at age seven (it timed out), but never since.

In about 25 years of using credit cards I've only once experienced a limit problem the bank thought I shouldn't visit five stores in the same day this summer. I had never had such a problem before, even though I've quite often visited many more stores than that in one day. I think this is a new thing with my card, at least. I consider it a Y2K problem.

We have very dirty power here. When it goes out it stays off long enough to choke my surge protector and thus my computer gets rebooted. Power almost always comes right back on, at least when it falters during the daytime (I can't speak for nighttime outages). Power here was off for about an hour without warning two days last September. One was on the 9th. That one they blamed it on a faulty transformer. The other outage encompassed the wider "Bay Area." For that one, I happened to visit my bank and noticed that they didn't fire up any backup generators.

I'm sure it's a good thing to try to convince people to hang tight as long as possible.

-- Dancr (addy.available@my.webpage), December 15, 1999.