What worries me is that when the Apocalypse doesn't come from Y2K, a lot of people are going to be really pissed. They'll take to the streets. They'll stir up trouble.

I can see them pouring into the streets shouting, "we want Armageddon, dammit, and we want it now!"

Neoluddites and their kin will walk the streets with their pitchforks and torches tying people with cell phones or laptops to lampposts and burning them in piles of moldering COBOL manuals.

Then they'll descend on the federal prison that Ted Kaczynski is in, bust him out of his cell and carry him through the streets on their shoulders as their leader.

They'll watch all the fireworks at celebrations worldwide and grouse about how it's destroying the ozone layer, and then strip off naked and run around singing choruses from "Hair".

Finally, and thankfully, before dawn they'll douse themselves in kerosene and immolate themselves, and the collective IQ of the planet will rise immensely.

Don't have a cow and write me a bunch of anti-gun letters, we didn't really stock up on ammo. (I mean, we had enough to do that already, so why spend the money needlessly?)

I can't even be allowed to mind my own business and contemplate the end of the world while at the grocery store. An example is a strange-yet-brief exchange I had with a cashier at Albertsons the other day when I went in to pick up a bill of groceries.

The cashier looks at all the things I'm buying, and asks, "are you stocking up for Y2K?"

"No," I tell her in my best deadpan voice. "We stocked up on ammunition instead. That way if anything happens we can take what we need from our neighbors."

She was remarkably quiet the rest of the time she was completing the transaction.

I have had this sorry vision of what'll happen in business after the new year rolls over and nothing happens. Companies will start to wonder why they paid all this money for remediation of potential Y2K problems.

Companies won't pay their consultants because they'll say if they were really expert, they would have known that the company didn't need Y2K remediation after all.

Heads will roll for people who had approved these expenditures. People with Y2K remediation on their r�sum�s will be shunned.

COBOL manuals will be burned in effigy, causing problems when all these fixes are still being used when their efficacy runs out, but nobody knows how to fix them a second time.

I fear that the end of the world is just being postponed.

I was talking to the friend who discovered my journal through my stupidity. He asked me if I thought there'd be any big Y2K problems.

"I don't think so." Secretly, I'm thinking, how the Hell should I know?

"Well," he starts, "I don't think we'll have any problems with the internet, at least. I mean, most of that's been made in the last few years, surely they made it all compliant, right?"

"You know that the phone companies supply most of the fiber and copper to carry the backbone traffic, right? Do you expect your phone and long-distance to work?"

He got really quiet, and finally let out a long "hmmm" that sounded like something that you'd hear from a whipped puppy.

Oops, I didn't mean to bring him down.

I just applied a bunch of Y2K fixes and service pack updates for Windows 98 and Office 97, none of which sounded really pressing, but I installed them anyway (better safe than sorry).

All but one ran without telling me what it was doing or installing. This is a strange embracement of the Unix philosophy by Microsoft.

I mean, generally, when you run a command or utility in Unix, if it executes without problem it doesn't give you any output. This is okay because you generally get source or, if it is a commercial Unix, you get a three-foot-thick stack of documentation with the binary distribution (or the equivalent on the media, anyway).

I didn't think this was the Microsoft Way. It's all the more disturbing 'cause I didn't get any docs, either, just these installables.

There's no telling, really, what these pieces of digital voodoo did to Gillian. I think they just put up some archives full of Bill Gates' honeymoon pictures or something, so that people would download them and be sufficiently accepting that these programs did something.

At least Gillian rebooted.

My Uncle called saying that he screwed up his computer. This is a regular thing when he gets software for Christmas and he has to install it. I bet the first three things out of his mouth will be "do you think it's Y2K related?"

I think I'll run out the door screaming if he does. Or send him out on the street with a cell phone to talk to the nice man with a pitchfork.

restlessmind