I've worked on Y2K for the past three years as a programmer contractor for various industries. County Govt, Network TV, Phone, and Insurance.

The insurance industry has the most date intensive applications that I have ever seen. Binary dates, packed dates. In many instances we were not allowed to test our remediation. Try expanding a binary date without the ability to test.

Watch for cracks in insurance in about a month for sure.

-- Infidel (Barbarians@thegate.net), January 01, 2000

Answers

I work in the industry and you're right it is very date sensitive. But what you didn't realize is that insurance industry systems have been handling y2k dates since last October. That's when policies that "renewed" after 12/31/99 started to be processed. In other words, policies renewals with expiration dates in the year 2000 were sent to customers. So what you didn't realize is that many if not most insurance company business systems had to be ready 14 months ago.

-- Insider (not@not.net), January 01, 2000.

Good.

Serve the bas#$!ds right. They've swindled the public for years. May be they can sue themselves for coverage!!

Seriously, I think we are going to see a lot happen over the next little while everywhere. Remember the FIRST DAY is NOT even over yet. Lets see what all the overnight processing does today when the systems calculate billing with one date in 01/01/2000 and the other date in 31/12/1999. If you done any programming you'll know the boundaries are where the problems are. We still have to hit the first boundary TONIGHT - we did NOT hit it last night.. So hang on folks.

-- Interested Spectator (is@the_ring.side), January 01, 2000.

Note that insurance companies are going to be going out of their way to prove that failures are date related (i.e. "forseeable events") and therefore not covered. Strange to think of them as the "good guys" here.

-- Servant (public_service@yahoo.com), January 02, 2000.