Anecdote... make of it what you will.

My company (small multinational telecomms) is taking their internal systems down between Christmas and New Year to perform unspecified last minute Y2K "work". We're just been told (21st December!) that we can't come in to work. When I queried IT services, I was told (eventually) "You can come in if you really want to, but you won't get paid because the network will be down, so you can't do any productive work."

The staff are being obliged to take the days off as vacation time -unpaid vacation time if they don't have enough paid days. Usually you can work between Christmas and New Year if you want to, but not this year. There are some very unhappy people in my office who were planning to work it, and are saying that if they won't get paid because our employer failed to prepare, why should they suffer? Why indeed.

I couldn't find out what the "work" was. Worst case, it's emergency fixes. Best case... I dunno. We're claiming we're already 100% compliant. What could we possibly be doing? Rollover testing? Why? It's way too late to fix any problems that emerge.

I suspect - but this is pure speculation - that all we're doing is turning everything off "just in case", as so many companies seem to be doing. But what about our support and helpdesk staff? They NEED access to the network, 24/7. It just doesn't make sense.

The whole decision seems muddled and pointless: either we're fixed or we're screwed, a couple of extra days isn't going to make any difference either way. And that's not reassuring, not at all.

Sorry, I can't provenance this. Even if I were to identify the company, I can't give direct links to the documentation (that's can't, not won't), and anyway, most of this isn't even documented. I had to find it out by persistent phoning. :(

-- Drone (not@chance.this_time), December 21, 1999

Answers

It is like being in an airplane you know is going to take a nosedive crash, you "jump" just before it hits to try and save yourself! ;-)

-- rumdoodles (rumdoodles@yahoo.com), December 21, 1999.

It's never too late to fix problems. So you'd rather they just let the problems surface and do nothing about them?

-- Maria (anon@ymous.com), December 21, 1999.