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I have some "bad indicators".... The banks are slipping their schedules.... The word on the geekvine is that TWO banking interoperability tests run by two different interbank organizations have been cancelled because of no-shows. These have both been scheduled for months. One was supposed to be a 10-day-long exercise. Cancelled. Well, postponed a while... This doesn't mean that the lousy $637.25 in your checking account is at risk but there are flashes of lightning on the horizon, the herd has good reason to be snorting and shuffling. - Cory Hamasaki

An important conference called the "Year 2000 Systemic Risk in Financial Institutions and Markets: Contingency Plans and Risk Management" took place in Manhattan last week [ third full week of January 1999]. As you might well expect with a title like this, it was not a conference for the faint of heart nor the casually curious about Y2K. Participants - high level Y2K remediators and top managers from banking, securities, and insurance industries - take Y2K very seriously.... The good news is that high levels of confidence were being expressed based on the increasing numbers of the systems now internally compliant or nearing compliance.... The FDIC spokesman said that there were less than 400 smaller and medium-sized banks that were not on schedule. (That's 400 out of 12,000 or less than 4 percent).... The not-so-good news is that there are serious concerns for financial systems as a whole expressed by several speakers: 1) While unitary systems within businesses are in advanced stages of remediation and testing, a great deal remains to be done on testing the inter-operability of all systems within those enterprises - large and small. 2) The tests for inter-operability of systems between financial institutions are still in the design stage. The securities industry's test last year involved 35 organizations. Larger tests are scheduled for the US later this year. How the international electronic data interchanges will be tested is still in the early stages of planning. 3) The fact that many foreign financial institutions, and the power and telecommunications companies upon which they depend are months behind and that they often have little or no funds for Y2K was mentioned several times. 4) The lack of Y2K progress by businesses and governments to whom large loans and investments have been made was a widespread concern. 5) The slowly growing public uncertainty, the possibility of bank runs, and a liquidity crisis is at the forefront of industry concerns. - Victor Porlier

Multiple, parallel national bank runs are a possibility. Your bank president screaming "Nobody panic!" will be drowned out by CNN, CBS, and the radio talk shows. In the recent DeeCee area ice storm, power failed in Montgomery County and ATMs did not dispense cash. Some stores and restaurants attempted to stay open but couldn't take credit cards. We've already had a taste of what happens when electronic money fails. Because of the risks, the government IS printing fifty billion dollars in cash.... Note: I am not predicting the event; I am reporting that the presses are running.... This is about having enough cash for a functional economy if electronic money breaks for ANY reason.... 1/4 inch of ice paralyzed Montgomery County and a half million to a million people shivered in the dark for 2-5 days and all the wishing really, really hard didn't make the ATMs work; sorry sir, we understand that your family is hungry but please step aside so we can seat the people with cash. It's the government's contingency to print the fifty billion in cash. This might be what we call "a clue". - Cory Hamasaki

I'm no Y2K apocalypse freak. I'm going to party my ass off in New Orleans or New York, maybe San Francisco or just Vegas. But I've noticed that virtually everybody I've ever talked to about it says they're withdrawing their cash in about August or September. Most of these people are system administrators. - Chris Gattman

I have first-hand experience that while the systems are in very bad shape, as I read the status reports bubbling up the management structure, the news gets progressively better. In one striking case, the organization's CIO reported to the press that they had "solved the Y2K problem" but in reality, they had only recognized that there was a Y2K problem. That organization is still mulling over how big the problem is. In the last week, they ordered a full court press on remediation for a soon-to-be replaced system. A few days later, they canceled the remediation because the contractor building the replacement system scammed the CIO into thinking that the replacement system was "absolutely going to be ready on time". It's still about money, clueless management, wishing really, really hard, and we're about to pay the price. - Cory Hamasaki

I have over 35 years of project management experience and am currently working on a major Y2K project. I can tell you with a high confidence level that we (the collective we) are not going to make it. I believe the Federal Government is trying their damndest to keep the masses calm, and at the same time, trying to deal with it, on a low key basis. I would love to be a fly on the wall in some of their planning meetings.... In addition to working as a Y2K project management consultant, I've spent over 500 hours researching Y2K. I strongly suggest others do their own research and then make their own conclusions. This issue is way too important to take anybody's opinion as fact. - Bill Watt

A local firm had their deathmarch meeting last week. The geeks were told that the deadline was end of summer and if they wanted Saturday and Sunday off, they could work 11-hour days (paid). The other choice was to work 8-hour days, 7 days a week but they could come in at 10 on Sunday. - Cory Hamasaki

When I think back to the Big Iron days, and look at what has happened since, and where we are now, I am not encouraged. So much is still the same. Sure, the technology has grown, and continues to grow, and at a frenetic pace. But projects are almost invariably late, still, even with reduced functionality. Good people remain hard to find, still, and harder to keep. Code still breaks. Systems still crash. User is still a four-letter word. Programmers still do stupid things like leave documentation for last, that is, when they bother doing it at all. Even when they do, it quickly becomes out of date due to the ever present requirements changes. In many cases, programmers have been asked to do Y2K in addition to whatever they were doing before, as a result of budgetary constraints. So they are doing their "regular" work, and are working longer hours to do Y2K. Many feel overloaded, and they are. Regardless of if it is panic or Y2K itself, failures we will have. Prepare to the maximum extent that you reasonably can.- Rob Michaels

The Y2K problem has been exaggerated by people who don't understand computers, and by computer experts who don't understand how the free market works. - Harry Browne

Suppose, now, that Y2K were to take out a large part of the power grid. There would be no crews braving ice-covered poles alongside the roads. The job of turning the lights back on would fall to a bunch of programmers in a windowless room somewhere, subsisting on pizzas and Jolt cola while searching for the elusive bug, then, trying to exterminate it. There are no satisfying front page newspaper photo-ops here. Worse, no one would be able to predict how long it might take to fix the system. It might happen quickly; however, it might not. Psychologically, this "not knowing" will be different from anything we have experienced in our recent past. For a society used to predictability and to a copious flow of update information, it may be a very unsettling time. - R. H. Wheatley

I can tell you today that if year 2000 hit today, the electric grid that serves South Dakota would go down. It would not stay up, and don't believe anybody that tells you it would. Now, by the year 2000, it might, but today it will go down. Year 2000 doesn't come in the middle of June when the temperature is decent. It's coming on December 31 in the middle of winter. - William Janklow [Governor of South Dakota]

I'm optimistic, but I'm also realistic. I'm not going to say that there won't be any local blackouts. But there won't be any bulk power system blackouts. We won't lose the whole Eastern Seaboard.... There will be isolated pockets throughout the US, but hopefully it's nothing to worry about. We're experienced at putting things back together once something happens. - Tony Elacqua [New York Power Pool engineer]

I talked to a friend who works at a power company in Florida yesterday. He is on the Contingency Planning Committee for y2k at the power company. He said electricity throughout the nation looks pretty good for the year 2000. There will be minor shortages at first, but nothing like week-long or longer electricity disruptions.... The idea that the nuclear plants are to be shut down is not true. The nuclear plants, I'm told, are more y2k compliant than anything. So who do we believe? ....My friend wouldn't deceive me in a matter like this. He was instructed to have all emergency systems ready to be put in place, as if we were hit by a hurricane, just in case. They know there will be problems, but are daily ruling out the doomsday scenario we might envision. - Alan Mostert

Seventeen percent of the utilities which responded to the NERC November [1998] survey estimate they have completed 10% or less of their fixing and testing of critical systems. Sixteen utilities have not done any remediation or testing yet. Are they at the starting line or still trying to get to the field? Just 34%, or one-third, of the utilities have completed more than 50% of critical systems remediation and testing. Two thirds (66%) have completed 50% or less of their remediation for critical systems. - Bonnie Camp

In the Northridge earthquake in CA in 1/94, just after the shaking stopped, I was clinging to a door frame looking out into the 4:30am "night." (Every siren, building alarm, and dog in the city making massive noise, not counting buildings creaking and people screaming.) And then it went totally black, black beyond what a city girl has ever really known. (Psychologically disturbing, to say the least.) And then green and blue lightning lit up the sky -- really bizarre and amazing and frightening. That was the transformers blowing out. Gee, I thought, it knocked out our power. No. It knocked out a lot of power, even a long way away. It knocked out power to most of the West Coast, to 10 states and part of Canada. That was just for one earthquake way over in southern California. I'd like someone to try and convince those people in Canada who lost power that the grid isn't fragile. That transformers overloading and blowing out halfway across the continent can't affect them. - P.J. Gaenir

Our government is not going to get all of its critical systems fixed in time for the century change. The evidence for this is overwhelming.... State and local systems that process Federal benefit checks are not likely to be fully remediated. - Robert Bennett (R-UT) [chairman of the Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem]

There are two hundred countries, more or less. They depend upon each other economically. The United States is utterly dependent upon the rest of the world, economically. When they go under, so do we. But the pollyannas refuse to address this. They see Russia in isolation. So Russia goes under, so what? Japan is not going to make it. Neither is Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina, Saudi Arabia and on and on and on. But nothing at all will happen to the United States. It will just be a speed bump for us. Just some ATM inconveniences, while the entire world's banking structure collapses. The only effect it will have on us is through ATMs. Out of the other few countries that are 'allegedly doing well', Canada has been preparing for full scale deployment of military personnel, England has recently announced that 405 of their biggest 1000 companies have not even begun assessing their embedded systems and that their biggest companies are NOT getting the job done according to the party line. Australia is a mess. Where are ALL the companies that promised to be engaged in a full year of testing? Slipping schedules, that's where.... 11 months to go. The vast majority of all companies should be in full scale testing, yet not a fraction of that actually are. - Paul Milne

The government of New Brunswick has shifted the Christmas holiday schedule for the province's schools in order to ease fears of computer chaos following the arrival of the new millennium.... The move followed a request from parents and teachers, the department of education said.... Schools will now close for the holidays on Dec. 23, 1999, and reopen Jan. 10, 2000. - news item

Fears of Y2K panic have prompted the federal government to begin quietly preparing a media strategy designed to assuage public fears of blackouts or other potential infrastructure failures. John Koskinen, assistant to President Clinton and chairman of the White House's Y2K council, has entered into discussions with a public-relations firm.... The firm has recommended conducting awareness surveys and honing a "stay-calm" message based on the results. - Declan McCullagh

Fearing that they might inadvertently cause a flight of capital and destabilize some large developing countries, [Global 2000 Coordinating Group,] a group of international banks, securities companies and insurers is weighing a retreat from plans to publicly rate the readiness of more than 30 nations to avoid major Year 2000 computer disruptions. - news item

PSE&G, the largest power utility in New Jersey, had only 15% of their systems repaired as of the end of December, and it took them a year to do that. At this rate, their systems won't be compliant until 2004. A change in approach is absolutely necessary for.... agencies finding themselves in this position.... They can't believe that with all the time invested, the manpower expended, and the finances consumed, that they are not going to be ready by January 1st. Despite mounting evidence of impending failure, they are holding fast to their original course of action. - Tamara Orbegozo [CEO of Year 2000 Specialists]

I expect to see some [power distribution] problems on 1/1/2000; even some that may be of a magnitude to impact system reliability in some isolated areas. These will primarily come from problem areas that no one anticipated in advance. Over the next 15 days, I'm postulating that the number of Y2k problems will increase, at first linearly, and toward the middle of January, exponentially, because of a combination of equipment failures and bad data propagating through systems (large, complex embedded and otherwise). Failures of complex systems are never linear in nature.... I believe that some level of sporadic service disruptions will continue through the Year 2000 because of the Y2k issue. - Rick Cowles

The point is that as more and more systems fail completely, in the sense of requiring the long term fix of actual remediation (e.g. the unemployment systems), the failures themselves will consume more and more of the increasingly scarce resources available to deal with the failures and the ongoing process of Y2K itself. These resources include programmers, temporary manual workers and money. I am convinced that at some point the rate of failures will be so high that there will not be enough resources to deal with the problems. At this point the web will collapse and so will the structure of society. I think it entirely possible that this will occur this year, before the rollover itself. Not because the rate of failures will be extremely high, but rather through the concomitant effect of a collapse of the global economy, a process which I believe is already underway. When the economy tanks, there won't be enough cash available to finish the ongoing remediation projects and they will add to the huge number of systems which will fail after the rollover. If it were just Y2K I would still be concerned, but not quite so much. But "it's the economy, stupid!" (nothing personal). The two together will feed on each other -- the economic collapse will cause Y2K failures to be worse and the Y2K failures will make an economic recovery impossible, leading eventually to the devolutionary spiral I have predicted. In many ways I am more concerned about the economy, which I see as in much worse shape than in 1929, just before the Great Depression. And this time I see no way out. - Moshe Shulman

The seeds are now being sown to directly blame the coming (potential) Y2K failures on those who have prepared - the cry now in the mass media is about the threat from hoarding and bank runs CAUSED by the ones who have prepared for trouble. - Robert A. Cook

I've got to say that as a Y2K project director who speaks with some of the Y2K managers in other Fortune 500 companies, a lot of these guys aren't coders - they're managers getting drift/spin from their managers beneath them.... There's a big disconnect called CYA. The grunts and the middle managers aren't exactly doing up-fronts with these guys.... Overarching the whole thing is that almost to a person, you hear, "We're not so much concerned about our own stuff - we're worried about our trading partners." I think this sets up the following scenario, which is already widely practiced. It's called finger-pointing. "Uh, I'm not sure why the computers are down, but we're looking into it. It's probably data we got from XYZ corporation yesterday. We're looking into it." - "Brett" (Internet post)

I believe that Y2K will be equivalent to throwing a million monkey wrenches into the "engine" of the global economy, and that it will lead to a depression similar in severity and duration to the Great Depression.... I believe it will wipe out a great deal of wealth in the stock market.... Large companies won't finish their Y2K projects; even if they manage to finish their mission-critical projects.... Several surveys in recent months have confirmed that nearly 75% of the small businesses around the world have not yet carried out any Y2K planning or remediation; even more amazing, 40-50% don't plan to do anything until something breaks on January 1, 2000.... Those who have warned about Y2K alarmists causing bank runs will usually admit that the entire fractional reserve banking system relies on the confidence of depositors: if all of us lose confidence in the banks, and if we all demand to withdraw our money, then the banks collapse. - Ed Yourdon

On February 2 [1999], the U.S. Mint, the largest producer of gold and silver coins, announced gold coin rationing. In the first six months of 1998, the Mint sold 96,000 ounces of gold coins a month, mostly one ounce eagles. In the second six months, it averaged 210,000 ounces. In January, 1999, it sold 268,000 ounces. That was the limit. The Mint began allocating coins to the wholesalers. Retail coin dealers are now having to ration coins to buyers: so many per week. - Gary North

The oldest computer in the world destined to suffer from the millennium bug resides in a museum in Liverpool, England - as a Renaissance artifact. The nearly 400-year-old instrument, which predicts the position of the planets, will stop working at the dawn of the 21st century.... An unknown craftsman in 1600 built the equatorium, which operates through a system of rotating discs and arms, to calculate the future positions of the sun, the moon, other planets, and eclipses. But the last date the creator inscribed was in 1999. - news item