Millennium Bug Was A Real No-See-Um

He’s becoming a poster boy for every sucker who bought into the Y2K malarkey.

Spokane’s Bob Swanson, the subject of a Dec. 5 column, spent 18 months and more than $50,000 preparing for the millennium bug that never bit.

Newsweek magazine picked up on the tale. Editors sent a reporter and photographer to join Swanson on New Year’s Eve and wait for society to shatter like a dropped champagne flute. He’s featured in the magazine’s current issue. A German TV news crew called Swanson the other day to set up an interview for this weekend.

So what does the 44-year-old massage therapist have to say about the soggy firecracker that was Y2K?

“I’m shocked,” says Swanson. “Maybe amazed is a better choice of words.”

Swanson claims he doesn’t care what people think. But he’d be less than human if he didn’t feel more than a twang foolish.

Swanson could have joined family members who were vacationing in Hawaii. He stayed put, thoroughly convinced the switch from 1999 to 2000 would create a chaotic chain reaction “like throwing a superball into a room full of dominoes.”

No Dark Ages reprise - surprise, surprise. And now, Swanson has some millennial-sized headaches to contend with.

How’s this for Y2 irony?

Swanson says he might have to put his Fortress of Readiness on the block unless he can boost his income enough to cover loan payments and rental fees for equipment he needs to run the place.

“I can put the stress behind me. I am having difficulty putting the bills behind me,” he says, adding that the notion of being self-sufficient is “more expense and more work than anybody can imagine.”

He hopes to land a better-paying job. Or maybe rent his basement out to college students who will help with the garden.

Here’s a thought:

Perhaps Swanson can cash in on the survivalist tourism market. He could offer his north Spokane compound as the world’s first bed, bunker and breakfast.

Swanson labored long and hard to create an elaborate system designed to make him self-sufficient.

He dug a well in his back yard and installed a 3,000-gallon water cistern. On top of the cistern’s high dirt mound, Swanson put a fish pond and paddy for rice and aquatic veggies.

He planted a fruit orchard nearby. He added $14,000 worth of solar panels to the roof of his home.

There’s the greenhouse, the storage shed and the root cellar with walls a couple of feet thick.

Swanson stockpiled enough food to feed four people for a year. He accumulated wood and essentials like hoses, hydraulic fluid and lamp oil.

“The only thing bigger than Y2K is the amount of denial,” he told me in early December.

Swanson says he suffered emotional pain when neighbors, friends and family members chose to bail out on his survival obsessions.

As it turns out, we skeptics were right all along.

Y2K paranoia infected the gullible like swine flu. They sought security with canned food and toilet paper. Fearmongers and opportunists hawked everything from generators to jugged water.

Spokane’s own Y2K preparedness movement was led by a few wingnuts who were just as whipped up about channeling the spirit world back in the airhead ‘80s.

These quacks tried to get everyone to turn off their power and flush their toilets with buckets of water during special millennium bug rehearsal days.

I’m no Kreskin, but a visit to one of their so-called Y2K Neighborhood meetings was enough to predict the future:

“Y2K feels to me like another of those New Age trends of the moment, like Hands Across America or the Harmonic Convergence,” I wrote on Jan. 17, 1999. “This may be the biggest flopola since Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone’s safe.”