January 20, 1999. Do you know the term "fizzle factor"? It means how much an actual event fails to live up to its hype. Well, somewhere, someone said that the Y2K problem will turn out to be the standard to measure all future overhype against.

In effect, the Y2K problem will have promoted more fear and cost more money than anything else ever that has amounted to so little.

While we're not feeling quite that cynical, we do think the actual impact of the millennium bug will be of the smallest variety.

"Any reasons?" you ask.

Yes, even beyond some tendency to a natural skepticism of anything that sounds too much like hype.

For one thing, news stories so far between January 1 and today, January 20, have been very short on computer date catastrophes.

Most "news" has been really just more opinion, speculation, and rehashed warnings of the "potential" problems. Not much has really happened.

A few employees were locked out of their office for a while one morning. A company had its software lock up after they closed a fiscal year and had to do 20-some payroll checks by hand. Hong Kong Harbor thinks its system crashed on December 31, but there was no trouble caused by that, and things were up and running again later that morning.

Some companies weren't able to book events and things to take place after January 1, 1999. An oil company couldn't operate a crane that thought it was overdue for a technical inspection.

None of these seem to have caused major problems, only delays and (maybe overdue) hardware and software upgrades/updates.

We're looking for stories now, before January 1, 2000, because the millennium bug can't be thought of as a one-day thing. Everything terrible is not expected to happen on the stroke of midnight on the last day of this year. These problems will occur anytime a transaction uses a date after January 1, 2000.

In a lot of computerized systems, a future date can be more than a year from the current date. It's quite common, for example, for accounting programs to run 18-month time frames. Problems should have started occurring last summer.

We would expect to see a long string of problems occurring between July 1998 and July 2000 actually.

Thus, the real stories we are reading seem to indicate a lot less than dire, world-rocking, large-scale systems crashes and their resulting panic. Future computer failure events should be pretty much single-story issues.

On the other hand, there is something we might be advised to fear more than computer failures -- What about human failures? The crashing of common sense, for example. And the frozen lock-up of reasoning ability.

What if enough people get worried enough as we get closer to the end of this year that they start over-reacting to rumors of problems starting?

Bank runs, demand exceeding supply for consumer goods from food to gasoline. Let's pray that none of our neighbors decide to stockpile things like gasoline in their garages.

The media could play a big role in the coming months, but then they always seem to do that anyway. Some would even say too big a role.

Right?

Written by Georgia L. Bell. Copyright Georgia L. Bell, 1999. Permission to reprint this article -- uncut, unaltered, and in its entirety only -- is granted only if all information in this notice, including link to New Millennium Three Year Celebration Website and copyright notice, is included as it is written. First published on The New Millennium Three Year Celebration on the WWW. -- http://www.site901.com/ -- mailto: jeorjia@otn.net.

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