There’S Still Y.002K Until Panic Starts

There’s a lot to love about the Year 2000 Glitch, or, as we techno experts like to call it, the Y2K Crisis.

Most delicious of all is the notion that computers, which were invented to perform mathematic computations far beyond the scope of our own puny brains, are stymied by a math problem that any third-grader can figure out:

What comes after 1999? (A) 2000, (B) 1900, (C) 1000, (D) 0, or (E) You’ve Got Mail!

The third-grader picks A, but the computer apparently picks B, C, D, or E depending on the techno expert who programmed it. In the case of government computers, it picks none of the above and instead sends you an unemployment check in the amount of $36 billion since it somehow believes that you were laid off from your construction job in 1998 B.C. If you’re smart, you’ll play along with it and ask for another $1,000 in disability pay for the time you hurt your back “lifting the final block on top of the pyramid.”

The other thing I love about the Y2K Crisis is that it has given us something to be hysterical about as the millennium approaches. We needed this here in America, because we have suffered from an alarming lack of things to get alarmed about in the last year or two. Sure, there’s Japan’s recession and Indonesia’s crisis, which might have thrown us into a panic if any of us actually bothered to read the news. But here in America, the most shocking development has been “Seinfeld’s” demise, and let’s face it, the last episode came and went with minimal effect on the stock market or global warming, although it did trigger Japan’s recession. Anyway, thank goodness for the Y2K Crisis, because what fun is a millennium without a superstitious, apocalyptic panic?

None of us, with the exception of Bob Hope, were around at the first millennium, so we don’t remember what an excellent occasion that was for a panic. In the years 998 and 999 A.D. most Europeans were working themselves into a fever over the upcoming Second Advent, or Millennium, in which Christ would return to Earth to judge the living and the dead. Some people were welcoming this event, and some were dreading it, depending on how naughty they had been recently. In other words, the vast majority were dreading it.

But the year 1000 came and went and the Second Advent did not occur, or at least if it did, it got zero publicity. The good serfs of Europe resumed, somewhat glumly, hoeing their fields and getting plastered on mead.

Meanwhile, fortune-tellers and traveling bards and various sorcerers were spewing all sorts of millennial nonsense about plagues decimating the population, earthquakes leveling entire cities and evil princes galloping through the land bringing war and destruction. This was right on the money.

So maybe we should not dismiss the Y2K hysteria outright. I have already been personally touched by the Y2K bug, which doesn’t seem fair since it is still only Y1.998K. Yet it happened to me as I was trying to pay my Internet account with my Visa card. The Internet company informed me that my Visa card had expired.

“That can’t be right,” I said. “I just got a new one. The expiration date is 4/01.”

That, of course, was the problem. Some computer somewhere decided that my Visa card had expired in 1901.

Now, is there anything more obtuse than a stubborn computer? Let me try to reconstruct the logic required for a computer to reach this conclusion: Somehow, I had gotten hold of a Visa card about 100 years ago, possibly by mail order from Wells Fargo, and then I had charged something to it, maybe a newfangled Stanley Steamer. Then, I had allowed the card to expire, but over the ensuing decades I had somehow gotten away with charging player pianos, parlor furniture, bathtub gin, Victrolas, Zenith console radios, Glenn Miller tickets, linoleum kitchens, love beads, platform shoes, and junk bonds on it. Then, finally, when I tried to use it for my Internet service in 1998, the computer finally, triumphantly, nailed me. I was 97 years delinquent.

Or maybe 997 years delinquent or 1,997 years delinquent. For all I know, the computer thought my Visa card had expired in the Year 1 A.D., which would have made me the first person in financial history to charge a Roman chariot at 15.9 percent, APR.

Think of the difficulty in getting that transaction approved. The world was in the midst of the Y1 Crisis, when 1 B.C. turned to 1 A.D., stymieing every abacus in creation.