More Mega Quotes V!

If today [August 5th, 1998] were the first day of 2000, then civilization as we know it would stop and people would die. Having food, guns and money would be a good idea. - Peter de Jager [quite a different tone than he says recently, huh?]

It's shocking just how few Americans care or even know about the coming Y2K crisis. The longer this ignorance and lack of concern last, the greater the shock when Americans realize the consequences. - Frank Luntz [president, Luntz Research Companies]

I personally believe the lights will go out in a lot of areas. - Charles LeGrand [Institute of Internal Auditors]

Come 2000 there will be rolling blackouts across much of the U.S.... In tests, several utilities have suffered system crashes as the date rolls over to 01/01/2000.... Our electricity transmission network is so highly interconnected that a failure in one sector can easily cascade to others thousands of miles away. - G.K. Jayaram [chairman, Transformation Systems]

Many power-industry experts admit privately that they think large-scale and extended power outages, beginning in January, 2000, are inevitable. - Jim Seymour [PC Magazine]

What we hear from our friends in the power industry is that many power companies will not be ready on time, that there will be power outages and that the extent of them remains unknown. - Ed Meagher

I think it is axiomatic that there are going to be power failures due to Y2K. The only thing that is uncertain about it is how many are you going to have and the extent to which the problem cascades. - John Pike [analyst, Federation of American Scientists]

The threats to the economy and the public are not going to be [from] federal systems. - John Koskinen

FAA still has 102 mission-critical systems that will not be tested and implemented by March 31st 1999. This includes 19 percent of the mission-critical air traffic control systems. - John Meche [assistant Deputy Assistant Inspector General, U.S. Department of Transportation, August 6, 1998]

The best we can do is test the key paths through the system, the main things that need to be done -- issuing refunds, getting information to the customer service representatives, sending out notices.... We're probably not going to get everything tested. In fact, I know we're not going to get everything tested. - Charles Rossotti [IRS commissioner]

The Federal Reserve and Treasury Department are very much aware this [Y2K-related bank runs] could happen, and they are making provisions for a substantial oversupply of currency to meet the currency drain. - Fred Breimyer [chief economist, State Street Bank & Trust Co.]

38 percent of IT professionals say they may withdraw personal assets from banks and investment companies just prior to the millennium. - Tanya Styblo Beder [principal, Capital Market Risk Advisors Inc.]

Some people say that if everybody took what was theirs, then the banking system would be ruined. Listen, if a 'system' is ruined by people wanting to possess their own property, you've got a badly screwed up system.... The banking 'system' is in trouble because it is a scam. If it were a real 'honest' banking system and not a fractional-reserve system with fiat money there would be no problem at all. The bank would be a warehouse of your property and you could go in any time and get what belongs to you. - Paul Milne

A friend of mine got notice today that NO ONE will be allowed to take vacation during Dec. 1999 or Jan. 2000 due to Y2K. (She works at a "major banking institution".) I had heard possibilities of this discussed before, but it was the first notice I have actually seen. People who plan to "escape" the cities in Jan. 2000 for a few weeks of vacation may lose their jobs to do so. - Gayla Dunbar

By the way, the insider info circulating in the DC area superprogrammer's grapevine is that the FAA is hosed. I don't have first- or second-hand info, this is stuff from the DC area rumor mill. Similarly, the buzz from NY/NJ is that the SIA [securities trading] test was a disaster and that the news blackout was imposed on purpose.... [On the latter] I've heard two reports of problems, both [people] asked not to be identified; one said, this is too hot for email, call me at home. I did. One problem is that these leaks are likely termination offenses. Here's the good news from the rumor mill. Chase, Merrill Lynch, and Travelers are in pretty good shape and Chase is in better shape than the others. The bad news is that there hasn't been much good news about anyone else. There's been bad news about specific firms, VP's screwing up, back-level systems and applications, geek raids, firms betting it all on C/S [client/server] rehosts that are years late... have been at 90% complete for the last year, reports of data corruption caused by Y2K testing and inadequate isolation, missing source. You name it, it's in the rumor mill and it's coupled to the street test. How bad is it? I hear it second or third hand... it's a long way from Manhattan to DeeCee. We need first-hand accounts... good and bad. I don't like the idea of a 'news blackout' and by the way, everything's fine, trust us. That's called spin doctoring and we know all about it in DeeCee. - Cory Hamasaki

I work as an engineer with the City of Albuquerque. The public works director stated a couple of months ago (I heard this directly from him) that the City's fire trucks would not work after the turn of the century. - Ruth Anna Minch

I predict that many companies will have problems in 2000, but the nation's fundamental defense, telecommunications, banking and finance, and government systems will have been fixed and will operate intact. There may be some minor inconveniences, but probably not enough to completely shut down society as some apocalyptic pundits would have you believe. - Ric Edelman [investment advisor and author, The Truth About Money]

Merrill Lynch: Ship of Fools. Several weeks ago they sent out their lame happy face report about how well the whole world was doing. Well, I guess they are so busy lying about everyone else that they weren't paying enough attention to themselves. Ooooops. Up goes that [Y2K] budget. Looks like they GROSSLY underestimated...doesn't it? Yup Yup Yup. Hey! That's a fifty percent increase. Yes sir, they can sure be trusted to figure out what is going on in the world when they can't even figure out what is going on in their own backyard. - Paul Milne

Anyhow, once testing began, there were numerous problems. When the system date was changed on the mainframe (this is, by the way, not as easy as changing the date on a PC--it takes approximately an hour to do), immediately all passwords had expired. No one had even thought of that! That wasted a day. It was the first of many wasted days. As the testing effort continued, there were numerous abends (program terminations) for a variety of reasons. Because only a subset of programs was being tested, the JCL (Job Control Language) needed to be modified. There are errors inherent in this process. It was determined that our department would require approximately 300 tapes to store data files. There was argument about whose budget that would come from. Meanwhile, the operations team lost their most experienced operator (20+ years of experience), as he joined our Y2K testing effort. Lots of bad blood and lack of cooperation from operations ensued. The developers also viewed this whole project as a nuisance. They were certain the code worked (as most programmers are), and they had more pressing duties every day with production fixes or problems. The lead developer (30+ years experience) missed several days when his father died. No one knew what he does, so everything ground to a halt. When we resumed, he discovered that our original baseline date needed to be changed because field offices use week-ending dates that are 2-3 weeks in the future on occasion, which meant that our baseline included dates into 2000, which we wanted to avoid. Etc., etc., etc. Bottom line? After 6 months, we are STILL in the EXACT SAME SPOT as when we started!!! OK, we've learned from our mistakes, but NOT ONE TEST has completed!!! Keep in mind that 50% of all companies who expect to fix their code in time plan to do NO testing. Also keep in mind that many are leaving only a few months for testing. - Steve Hartsman

There is a Fortune 500 company in the Philly area that is APPARENTLY very organized and proceeding well. Unfortunately, I know the quality engineer on the project and he feels the test plans for the various 20 million lines of code are woefully inadequate. What does he do? Rubber-stamps them due to management pressure. Oh well, he IS a consultant after all... - Ray Givler

I had lunch with one of the DeeCee area superprogrammers today, ran into him by chance at a local lunch dive.... Mr. superprogrammer works for a large NYSE listed corporation, you've heard of them but let's keep the name confidential... -shsssh- No, no clues. I'd asked him about Y2K in the past so I didn't have to prompt him to spill the beans. He whispered that his MIS VP and CIO have announced their "retirement". Then he detailed the schedule for the deathmarch, they are rebuilding the corporate information system, it's currently NOT y2k compliant. "If we only had an additional year and a half..." -sigh- I didn't tell him that a couple weeks ago, I heard that the Chief Scientist was also "retiring". Hmmmm, the MIS VP, the CIO, and the Chief Scientist... all three are suddenly retiring. They announce the death march schedule. ....and by the way, we'll see you around, clowns. Haww haww haww, suckers! A superprogrammer who has a decade of experience on the corporate information system wants an extra year and a half... until summer 2001. But this schedule can't slip.... By the way, the press releases say that they're doing fine, almost Y2K compliant now; trust us, we "get it". - Cory Hamasaki

I'm a COBOL programmer. Until last week, the company I work for thought it was making good progress on the Y2K problem.... When we tried processing data with dates after 1999-12-31; guess what? Everything ran fine but we didn't get any hits on the database. We tracked the problem down to the following: Back in the late '80s and early '90s the data loaded to the DB2 databases were converted from older databases....that did not contain "end dates". So someone plugged them with a hardcoded value of '1999-12-31'. Guess they were afraid that plugging them with something like '3000-01-01' might cause problems. Now we are faced with a massive problem. We have millions of records on thousands of files that must be corrected. To make the problem even worse, these records are mixed in millions of records that have been entered since the initial load. Many of these "new" records contain valid end dates of '1999-12-31'. We are doomed. - anonymous programmer

About twenty years ago, while working on the design of a new system for a major company, I pointed out to my superiors that the common practice of using six digit dates would cause problems in the year 2000. They laughed at me! I was told, a) it was a standard practice, b) this system would surely be replaced by then, and c) none of us would be around in twenty years to worry about it. Well, they were partly right. I moved on long ago. Several weeks ago I was introduced to someone who now works for that company and division. I asked her if the system was still being used, and she confirmed that it is still a critical system and has not been made year 2000 compliant.... The system in this case is merely used to manage the design and manufacture of aircraft controls and military weapons! - Joel Ackerman

Some folks.... seem to have the notion that others of us.... who are actually offering Y2k services or information are right up there with the best of the snake-oil salesmen. That we have the perfect issue to scream 'fire', so that the big company corporate exec's (who really don't know shit from shinola about the technical aspects of the issue) will, in a fit of corporate mob hysteria, cough up the big bucks for a bottle of Y2k elixir. That we're a bunch of self serving jerks who ratchet up the tone of the discussion for our self-serving purposes. That the information and details we provide are suspect because we're not business virgins and our intentions must most assuredly not be pure. I'd submit to you that what you've got is a few people who were out on the leading edge of the issue a few years back, educated themselves on the topic, started offering assistance, and actually found a market for that assistance. The analysis of the issue by folks such as Peter de Jager or Ed Yourdon or Cory Hamasaki, and their ability to influence others, is a direct result of a lot of hard work, sleepless nights, and years of 8 to 5 career work prior to the Y2k issue galvanizing the sum of that career work. - Rick Cowles

In 2000, we will begin the great reversal of this myth of bureaucratic sovereignty. The survivors of y2k will not soon surrender to the bureaucrats again. The bureaucrats will starve. Literally. So will all those who have trusted the administrative state for their income. When the government's safety nets break, so will our straightjackets.... One of the few joys I will have in 2000 is knowing that most journalists will be out of work. They will be standing on street corners with signs: "Will write liberal drivel for food." - Gary North