Y2K

I'm heavily involved with Y2K issues, and there are going to be plenty of real problems, and not all of them will be on January 1. There was a story in todays Wall St. Journal about an aluminum smelter that shut down because it couldn't handle the leap year in 1996 ! It did half a million dollars worth of damage. We have discovered access control systems (doors with electronic locks and swipe cards or keypads to gain entry) that have y2K problems -- they know the date, because they know which shifts and days of the week people work, and only allow access while a person is actually "on duty". When they get confused or detect any problem, they go to an "all-open" state, to prevent the possibility of locking someone up in a fire situation. Which is fine, but some of these systems are installed in hospitals (including mental hospitals) and prisons. We thought our printers didn't care about dates, but low and behold, we found a bank passbook printer that DID care about dates, and it malfunctioned when fed a y2k date. Admittedly only a cosmetic problem, but a problem none the less. The FDA has found seven medical devices that have malfunctioned in 1999 (already). Seems that "99" in the year field had a special meaning (we've found this in a LOT of systems). At first these looked like cosmetic problems only, the date is not functionally used, but is printed on a printer. Until it became clear that such printouts could cause a physician to conclude that a patient's blood pressure was going up instead of down. Or that his EKG was getting better instead of worse. According to a recent SEC filing by AT&T, the company acknowledges that they cannot guarantee that they will complete their y2k work in time, and they will not guarantee that some of the possibly unfixed issues will not cause service interruptions, possibly extended. The truth is, I can't tell you if any of the "nightmare" scenarios will happen or not, and y2k might indeed seem to have been hype if none of them do. Further, anyone who makes a prediction is doing nothing but guessing. But be aware that over half a TRILLION dollars will have been spent on this, so I can assure you that whatever happens on 1/1/99 (or later, in particular at the end of February of 1999), IT WAS NOT HYPE. Barry Watzman PS - and while we are spending the money to at least attempt to address it, bear in mind that Europe is WAY behind, and Asia Pacific has been too busy trying to survive to have even looked ahead to recognize that the end of the century is coming.