The end may be near but
that's not all bad
by sonya hammond
Unless you've been standing in line waiting to see Star Wars: The Phantom Menace for the last six months, you've probably heard about the latest non-cinematic threat to woman/mankind, when on or about 12:01 a.m., January 1, 2000, life as we have come to demand it to function may cease, throwing us back in time to approximately 1952 ... or whenever it was that our ability to survive without computers ended and we succumbed to electronic dependency.
Of course the arrival of a New Year has often been prophesied by various self-styled arbitrators of morality as a time for which we should prepare by repenting our sins [a warning that apparently applies to everyone except Pat Buchanan and the cast of The 700 Club], in anticipation of the day of reckoning ... a sort of spiritual comeuppance ... which will soon be upon us. For some reason the advent of a new year serves as a wake-up call for greater change than simply remembering to date our checks correctly.
This caveat is compounded, however, when not just any old new year, but a new century rolls around, and the one fast approaching has three zeros which seem to indicate some sort of landmark point in time is about to occur.
The last one of those we had was around the time Leif Eriksson showed up in North America, which gives you an idea of the sort of earth-shaking stuff that can happen. The doomsday sayers are beside themselves, but their lamentations can barely be heard above the roar of those who predict the less spiritual, but far more terrifying, downfall facing us.
Come the Year 2000 [abbreviated somewhat preciously to Y2K], the world's computers, the 'brains' behind everything from baseball stats to nuclear fail-safes, will develop electronic Alzheimer's simply because 3 zeros will roll over in the slot machine of time. In one moment of befuddled reasoning, warn the 'experts', in this case those who actually understand how RAM works, computers will decide it is 1900, and large chunks of their hard drives will hit the fan.
The ramifications will vary, according to lists updated hourly, from nothing we will notice to the failure of electric power, wiping out of bank funds, or, in the worst possible scenario, nuclear war, some of which we will almost certainly notice to one degree or another, particularly if we finally get in to see The Phantom Menace and all of the above happens in the middle of it.
As a consequence of the understandable fears these possibilities have raised among those of us who will never understand RAM or even ROM, which, for all we know, may be the same thing, a cottage industry of amazing proportions is flourishing to provide endless lists of stuff absolutely necessary to sustain the lives of a population that was gradually rendered helpless to fend for itself by the advent of electricity and the invention of frozen food and microwaves.
No more 'Plug and Play'. Goodbye Microsoft; hello Energizer Bunny.
Smitten by a sudden attack of sincerity and concern that panic be avoided, the voices of an opposing group composed of terrified software manufacturers and/or experts who understand not only RAM and ROM, but even why HTML magically translates into real language on the Web, are raised in soothing tones to assure us that all the computers that really matter to us will be 'compliant' by January 1. This is reassuring only up to a point. I mean, after all, these are the same guys who until recently didn't notice that the computers weren't compliant.
All of which surely must lead everyone who wasn't paralyzed into a stupor by Star Wars: The Phantom Menace to an inevitable conclusion: Are computers really worth the pain and suffering?
That may depend somewhat on how you react to your water supply being cut if you didn't have the foresight to rent a port-a-potty. But there's a matter of perspective involved here. Don't forget, should power companies fail, we won't be able to use our own computers. From where I sit, which due to my misguided notion that I'm a writer, is usually in front of an accusingly blank 17" screen, this is not all bad.
My computer, while theoretically compliant to avoid the Y2K glitch, is rarely compliant to anything I want it to do. It's been out to screw up my life since the day I overloaded my household wiring to accommodate its voracious appetite for every accessory and piece of software PC Magazine relentlessly told me I couldn't live without. It isn't so much the initial cost as the upkeep.
If Y2K does dump us into self reliance and a steady diet of canned Spam and beans, it could also force us to come clean cold turkey of upgrade addiction, megahertz envy, modem fixation and compulsive e-mailing with no effort whatsoever on our parts. Even should we, for reasons that have made Bill Gates a gazillionaire, suffer severe withdrawal over these losses, there will be consolations.
No more programs sitting around refusing to 'respond', no more notices that we have failed to 'interface' [as though we had a clue why we should], no more missing 'drivers', which apparently exist in the trillions, but never in any program we desperately need to use.
It isn't that we should necessarily look forward to the breakdown of airline schedules [like that's never happened before], blacked out cities, or traffic permanently stalled at red lights.
And god knows it would seem like the perfect time for everyone to agree on total nuclear disarmament.
But all things considered, computer-wise, from where we sit ... long-suffering and unwillingly compliant to Windows 95/98 ... Y2K may turn out to be as good as it gets.
©sonya hammond, 1999