Or maybe the insurance gods paid for this article. Who knows.

At best this article points to an issue we might have otherwise overlooked. Some of the things which go wrong the evening of Dec 31st will have nothing to do with Y2K and should be addressed as normal. The problem is that with Y2K occurring at the same time, information might be lost in the increased noise level.

http://www.year2000.com/y2kvigilance.html

-- lisa (lisa@work.now), December 01, 1999

Answers

Peter's right as usual. Get ready for minor irritations. Don't go overboard if something goes wrong.

We'll be just fine everyone. I wish I could hold all your hands through this. I guess I can virtually.

John

-- John Blunder (johnb@orr.net), December 01, 1999.

Really. If soup lines develop, and gas is rationed or unavailable, and folks are eating shoe leather, don't jump to the conclusion that this is y2k related.

John Blunder - please tell me that's a made up name.

-- a (a@a.a), December 01, 1999.

Yes, it is my real name. The doomers on the site are incredible. They actually beleive that chemicals are being dropped on them. He he.

J

-- John Blunder (johnb@orr.net), December 01, 1999.

Yes Blunder, and the poor folks at Tuskeegee actually thought those government scientists injecting them with syphilis were trying to help them.

Idiot.

-- a (a@a.a), December 01, 1999.

Can somebody explain the polly hypersensitivity to any de Jager ribbing?

Does de Jager co-ordinate the shill assignments and payroll or something?

-- lisa (lisa@work.now), December 01, 1999.

>>Does de Jager co-ordinate the shill assignments and payroll or something? <<

He tried, but he was only willing to pay in Canadian dollars (AKA the northern peso) so he didn't find many takers. (g)

-- Johnny Canuck (j_canuck@hotmail.com), December 01, 1999.

yes, john, contrails are a joke, he he, also nuclear fallout is harmless, since the 50's government said so, when they bombed near populated areas, and left the civilians nearby to die slowly of radiation posioning + cancer... MORON.

-- Crono (Crono@timesend.com), December 01, 1999.

With a name like blunder, you have to wonder...

-- so (so@so.so), December 01, 1999.

[Oops!! How did I miss this thread...!:)]

"With these [concerted remediation] efforts, doomsday has now been averted, says Peter de Jager, a Brampton, Ont.-based programmer and consultant, whose warnings about the looming Y2K problem helped sound the alarm among government and industry leaders around the world. But Mr. de Jager says he is worried that his most recent pronouncements have been interpreted as a signal that all Y2K problems are solved and everyone can relax. "I'm frankly flabbergasted to read reports that I've said that the year 2000 thing is a dud or that it doesn't exist," he says. "We need to be very vigilant because there are still very large issues out there. No matter how diligent we are, there are going to be problems," he says. Every organization is likely to encounter glitches that have been overlooked or new errors that were introduced when the original problems were being fixed. And with these problems comes a certain degree of risk, he says. "The wild card is what if some of these problems are critical points of failure, where one failure has a far-reaching effect throughout your organization?" - 'Preparing For The Worst, What's The Best To Expect?', GLOBE AND MAIL, 20th April, 1999 "On a personal level, [Canadian Y2K guru Peter] de Jager said every household in North America ought to maintain a normal level of sufficiency for any disaster, about two to three weeks of food, supplies and a generator." - from a report in the (U.S.) Evansville Courier And Press on the "Are You Y2K Okay?" seminar sponsored by the Metropolitan Evansville Chamber of Commerce in May, 1999. "Even Peter de Jager is astounded by the complacency that greeted his widely reported Doomsday Avoided essay, which ran first on his Internet site and was quickly disseminated with varying degrees of accuracy throughout the world's mass media. As he told us in frustration, "the media can't sing in middle C."" - From the book "KRASH! How Y2K Could Sink The Stock Market And What Canadians Can Do About It," Stephen Gadsden & Jonathan Chevreau, published by McGraw-Hill Ryerson Limited. "In the past few years, various groups and individuals have been preaching the necessity of stockpiling food, cash, candles, camping gear and weapons. The more extreme "Y2K activists" have even recommended building underground bunkers or heading into the woods. Mr. de Jager will have none of it. "Over the next little while, when we go to the grocery, we will buy an extra couple of cans of soup," he says." - In The Houses Of The Gurus', Marjo Johne Financial Post, 22nd October, 1999. And this gem from PC WORLD, Sept. 22, 1999 [just imagine - all those power utilities spending hundreds of millions to try to fix a "bogus problem"!]... "Some millennium computer bug prophets of doom are having second thoughts, but others are still insisting that the world faces chaos at midnight on December 31, 1999. Computer industry consultant Peter de Jager has spent more than six years traveling the world warning about the potential for disaster from the millennium bug. He was among the first experts to realize that an old method of recording dates on software could cause mayhem in computers when clocks strike midnight at the end of this year. According to de Jager you can relax. Power generation around the world is unlikely to be affected. Telephone and data transmission will continue as usual. The banking system is rock solid. "Nowhere (globally) has any power utility found anything related to Y2K that could have shut off or disrupted power supply. The whole notion of blackouts is bogus," he says. He reckons that there may be some blackouts over the millennium period, but this will be due to local management problems as demand fluctuates, rather than computer systems. De Jager believes the biggest threat will come from the public's perception of the problem rather than from Y2K itself. If consumers decide to stockpile essentials like food, water, or cash, this could severely disrupt economies." There could be Y2K chaos without a single computer failing. . . ."

-- John Whitley (jwhitley@inforamp.net), December 02, 1999.

Mr. de Jager is also quoted as saying that he'd never seen a computer failure that took more than 2 or 3 days to fix. The man needs to head over to Hershey Foods (or the Philly school system, or Chase, or [pick one]) and straighten all those poor benighted folks out.

-- Mac (sneak@lurk.hid), December 02, 1999.

Jager was a transitional figure in the Y2K community. What he does henceforth really is trivial. Think of him as you did Gorbachev. He once was very important, but now matters hardly at all. Like Gorby, the media and "foreigners" (DGIs) were the last to catch on to the onset of his irrelevance.

www.y2ksafeminnesota.com

-- MinnesotaSmith (y2ksafeminnesota@hotmail.com), December 02, 1999.