Mega Y2K Quotes

MEGA Y2K QUOTES I

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If we only have Ed Yourdon's 10-year depression, we'll be lucky. - Cory Hamasaki

We know that there will be disruptions in commerce. What we don't know is exactly how it will manifest itself. Will it be like the gas crisis of the 1970s when a government panic and management hysteria made slight shortfall into a disaster? Y2K is shaping up that way. With the message that "everything is fine", "everything is on schedule for September 1998". "No, make it December 31, 1998", "Oopsie, make it March 31, 1999", and now the rumor mill has the real completion date as July 1999. The idiots have set things up for a huge panic. It wouldn't have been a problem if they stated last year that the systems would not be fixed on time. Issued reasonable and factual information on contingencies that everyone can take.... But no, look at who's in charge, look deep into the soul of Ko-skin-em and tell me that you don't see a big-brain'ed control freak. Listen to his words, the fool has taken a situation that should have been a mere nuisance and is turning it into disaster. - Cory Hamasaki

I have had personnel working within the FAA's Y2K project state flatly that there is no way the FAA will get its new air traffic control mainframes installed, on line, and functioning in time. - Bruce Webster

I'm in Worshington DeeCee too and I've heard similar info from others, "Don't fly during the rollover. We're in big trouble." Again, no names please, this is the geekvine and some people are afraid for their jobs. - Cory Hamasaki

While no one can say that the rollover to the year 2000 will be trouble-free, I am impressed by the efforts to date to address the problem in the banking and financial system. For our part, the Federal Reserve System has now completed remediation and testing of 101 of its 103 mission-critical applications, with the remaining two to be replaced by the end of March. - Alan Greenspan [February 24, 1999] [He's more interested in preventing a banking panic]

The Dee Cee government just put 300 IBM'ers to work on Y2K. They conned, uh, received a 60 million dollar grant from the Feds and are asking for more. Two Arlington firms declared "Deathmarch" last month. I know geeks at both. One firm has demanded either 11 hour days five days/week or if you wish to work 8 hours/day, you can shift to 7 days a week, no holidays, vacations, or weekends until Y2K is solved. The "Deathmarch" has started here in DeeCee. Given the traffic, life demands, etc. our 11 hour days are not like 11 hour days in Spokane or Boise. I know geeks who are looking to bail, who are pissed that after years of begging to be allowed to work on the software that now, the massa is giving them a taste 'o the cat. -snap- Owee. Code, geek! Row well and live.... By the way, they are rowing to make the new July 1999 Y2K deadline, not the old March 31, 1999 deadline. - Cory Hamasaki

This obstacle of lawyers is evident in all industries. I know of banks, payroll companies, government agencies, insurance companies, water companies, etc., etc., etc. who have told me privately that they're done, complete, finished - but cannot announce this good news because of the lawyers. - Peter de Jager [And we are presumably expected to believe they are ALL compliant, Peter?]

I can safely say that most of the observers in the public press have grossly misunderstood the problem.... I track the press, not for information but to get a sense of what the sheeple are ingesting. The press will ignite the panic. Those idiots have issued clueless statements and detonated so many pomposity bombs that the public has been stunned into inaction.... "There's a problem," they say, "but only get two cans of Spam and one candle." Gradually the story leaks out, "this thing ain't under control, the orbit's decaying, the anti-matter is zapping sparks, and it's worse than we've been saying." At some point a real panic will be raging and it will be because they let the pressure build up too long. It's too late now. Maybe there was something we could have done. - Cory Hamasaki

During closed-door meetings of the White House's Y2K council, for instance, attendees began worrying about whether they should advise the public to make personal preparations. At one council meeting, an Agriculture Department representative complained that the agency's most frequent telephone inquiry has become: "How many cans of food should I stockpile for my family?" But government officials fret that if Americans are told to prepare, people would cash in their mutual funds and spark bank runs -- activities that could send the country into a recession or worse. The solution: Advise just limited preparation. - Declan McCullagh

The central government computer that controls Medicare and welfare payments is far behind schedule on Y2K repairs.... The US Department of Health and Human Services has abandoned plans to replace its payment management system, which hands out US$165 billion a year in federal funds. Instead, it is scrambling to reprogram the system.... Dozens of agencies rely on the payment management system. It funnels money to everything from research universities and state governments to airports receiving grants from the Federal Aviation Administration. - Declan McCullagh

I would not be surprised to see 10, 20, 30 percent of the Fortune 5,000 tank out in the next 5 years. Some of this is geekvine stuff, some is experience, some is first-hand knowledge which I will not indentify. - Cory Hamasaki

Some of you might be interested to know that we got interested in this subject [Y2K], and went into it expecting to do a "hoax" piece that would expose the doomsayers; but after doing almost six months worth of in-depth research and then four more months of interviews with some of the top people in the country...I was personally pretty scared. - Les Rayburn [director, Millennium Factor: The Truth About Y2K]

As a Cobol programmer fixing code for Y2K compliance for a large oil trading firm.... I can assure you that most large companies are way behind schedule, including my own. Regrettably, these very same companies tell the general public everything is OK and not to worry when they know they have no chance of making the deadline.... The situation is really quite desperate and most code programmers are indeed stocking up on food. Most people have no idea how severe and long-lasting the disruptions will be. Those who do not prepare may possibly die as a result of Y2K. - Michael Taylor

Based on the information we have at this time, we do not expect major national disruptions in critical services. There is no indication that the Y2K problem will cause national failures in basic infrastructures such as electric power, telecommunications, banking, and transportation. - John Koskinen [federal Y2K czar]

Will we suffer failures, glitches, bankruptcies etc. etc. because of Y2K? Of course we will... but will the banking system collapse? NO. Will we lose telecommunications around the world? NO. Will we suffer blackouts right across America for weeks at a time? NO. How can I say that? Because these organizations have solved enough of the problems to avoid these scenarios. The worst case scenarios have been avoided. In that sense and perhaps that sense alone, Y2K has been solved.... I'd say that the overall human reaction now poses a greater risk to society than do the remaining Y2K problems. - Peter de Jager

Nothing's going to happen. At least, nothing catastrophic. The chances for major failure in critical computer systems is very small. And chances of failure of any kind is only 2.5 percent. - Tom Oleson [Y2K Research Director at International Data Corp.]

Recent weeks have seen all manner of reassurances from government officials and corporate trade associations. All will be well because so much has been finished and so much is on schedule that life and the economy will continue as before -- aside from brief disturbances in some U.S. localities. We are being told that what has been, is what will be. Except of course, for small and medium-sized U.S. enterprises, small and medium-sized U.S. counties, towns, school districts, and special purpose districts; and most foreign countries -- few of which are Y2K-ready and many of which are the suppliers and the distributors of the goods and services essential to large corporations and government agencies, and who employ millions. - Victor Porlier

Those of us in the Year 2000 industry feel that the government has been fabricating the truth for so long about its Year 2000 efforts, that it is now too late to take meaningful action that could possibly ensure success. When you talk to the people responsible for actually working on the systems, i.e. the programmers and analysts in the various agencies who are plugging through the code and making the changes, they, more often than not, give very pessimistic assessments of their agencies' ability to make it on time.... However, as you move up the chain of command, the outlook becomes more optimistic, until as you near the top, there appears to be no problem. - Michael P. Harden [of Century Technology Services]

I don't understand how the [banking] authorities can give `satisfactory' Y2K compliance ratings to institutions that have apparently missed a critical compliance deadline [December 31, 1998].... I personally believe the authorities are either using outdated information in their pronouncements or simply sugar-coating the truth. - Martin Weiss [chairman, Weiss Ratings, Inc.]

In general, the news is supposed to report what happens rather than interpret and analyze. What's happened is some droolers in DeeCee have been wakened from their slumber, wha-ha? It's 1999 and no work has been done on the DeeCee systems (not that anyone else is in much better shape, did I mention banks such as BankAmerica? No, I didn't and I don't know some code-heads in San Francisco who report that the BankAmerica is in horrible shape. And anyway, if I did, this would just be a clueless Internet rumor, so ignore this). ....Please, it's worse than I've been saying.... This is not going to be fixed by the Feds. They tried. The agencies with some smarts have all bailed out of DeeCee. You'll find them in the burbs, Maryland or Virginia. Some have tried to make a break for West Virginia too. Here are a few, National Science Foundation, Defense Logistics Agency, Defense Communications Agency, National Bureau of Standards (now NIST), National Institute of Health, NEE-MA, all safely outside of DeeCee. - Cory Hamasaki

The geekvine in DeeCee says that there are parts of the military and government that haven't started assessment yet. -- I heard from geeks at Social Security that when Bill made the "Social Security is Done" speech, they all gave each other dumb looks. "What's he talking about?" - Cory Hamasaki A close to home example: My spouse works for the FAA doing computer support. Spouse's boss told upper management that their department was compliant when in fact only some parts of the system were compliant. (Evidently, boss thought it okay to lie because "the rest of the system would be ready on time.") On time and government in the same sentence - isn't that a contradiction in terms? Spouse would lose job if this were known. Spouse did informal survey yesterday of four techies. Two said nothing's gonna happen, one said, 'wife always has 6 months of food stored' and one (the y2k rep for his department) says he's taking lots of $ out of the bank and converting stocks to cash. - anonymous Internet post

In a world where companies that sell browsers, run search engines and, Lord help us, sell books on the Internet, have valuations in the billions of dollars, it's hard to understand the importance of legacy code. Get over it, people; the world does not run on eBay, it runs on legacy iron, 50,000 IBM-style mainframes, 500,000 AS/400s, 100,000 S/3xs, and who knows how many VAXen, PDP-11's, and DGs.... It's started to unravel, time has run out, management is babbling like crazed loons, tonight I heard about another deathmarch. All weekends and holidays are canceled for the rest of the year. - Cory Hamasaki

We have done some quite scientific surveys of our supply base and Asia is statistically way, way behind in terms of their preparations for Y2K.... People are talking about stockpiling cash, water and canned goods. Given what I and everybody else in the computer industry knows about Asia, it might not be a bad idea to stockpile some computers for the next millennium. - Scott McNealy [CEO of Sun Microsystems]

My husband, who works for a small computer services company, got 16 phone calls last Friday alone, from local companies with Jo Anne Effect problems, all of them trying to close out January. They were not current clients.... He did a y2k program on January 28th for the local PC users group and talked about the Jo Anne Effect [named after Jo Anne Slaven, who first recognized that accounting systems would have difficulties up to 32 days before the beginning of a FY 2000], among other things. In the audience were members of an accounting group who have been getting frantic phone calls from businesses who can't close their books. The accountants are telling these people to call Jon, rather than dealing with it themselves.... Jon gave them a temporary fix, which was mainly to NOT forecast a year ahead into 2000 for now, and then to upgrade their accounting packages as soon as possible. - Jocelyne Slough

I am personally involved in Y2K at our plant that manufactures high-tech prototype and production printed circuit boards. We are experiencing a 95% failure rate in the ongoing testing of our PCs and proprietary computer-controlled process equipment. All the hardware was given a Year 2000 date rollover test and the vast majority failed. We also have hundreds of embedded processors that can't be tested and we will have to result to FOF (fix-on-failure) or letters of compliance from vendors and suppliers, which are always suspect. I can't believe the denial I'm seeing in the face of this wholesale failure of our systems. - programmer, anonymous out of necessity

Fix on Failure cannot work. If this were a possible option, you could simply take the system to a recover site, run it in the future with a few test records, watch for the failures, and in a few hours or days, completely repair the system. The reason that remediation and testing has been scheduled for months and years is that it really, really does take that long to find and fix the problems. When the rollover occurs, the systems that fail will take months or years to repair. The question is, what happens to society and civilization when the large complex systems that run everything no longer operate? - Cory Hamasaki

I saw and heard nothing but excusers {sic} ....in chorus from corporate moronic minions I suffered under/through for four, major scale, IT Y2K projects from February 1997-December 1998. It was all a good, conscientious person of 33 years experience could stand. Internal cover-ups and public denials within corporate walls had become daily routine. Pollyannas have never seen -- and probably never will see - [this] through the Y2K rose colored glasses.... Self-retirement was the only honorable and timely option open for me. I did it! - Robert Mangus

I am a partner in a software development company that is generating Y2K-compliant software. But we can't market our software because insurance companies refuse to insure software companies because of the "risk" of Y2K. Our government clients will not do business with us unless we have insurance. They need our software, we can't deliver it to them even though we have it prepared and ready to replace their current systems. Go figure. Our screwed-up society is what is going to bring us down... not programmers or technology. Our own decisions to cover our asses are causing problems. My company is here to help, and we can't. Insurance companies won't let us. In this regard, insurance companies are just as guilty as the public making rushes on the bank. ....I made a decision today after careful thought to my recent experience with insurance companies - I got an appointment at my bank to close my saving account.. - Ken Boettger

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