2000.01.07
Utah Food Bank knocked out by Y2K bug

On January 4th, the "MTX" inventory system for the Utah Food Bank in Salt Lake City went down for the day. The software upgrade disk supplied by the vendor couldn't be used before January 1st and the first disk provided didn't work. The next one did. According to staff it was a tense time and they don't know if they are out of the woods yet. They have checked with their peers to see if others using the same system were having problems -- they weren't. The challenge is that they still need more user-friendly software that can handle the many varieties of input (e.g., sometimes the food bank receives cases of food, sometimes individual cans) and the standard systems make it difficult to account for anything but cases.

Impact: Services to clients were not disrupted.

Contact: Brenda Thompson, Executive Director, 801 887-1227.

Submitted by: Center for Y2K and Society, www.y2kcenter.org

-- Philip Bogdonoff (pbogdonoff@y2kcenter.org), January 07, 2000

Answers

A big thank you to Philip Bogdonoff for this follow-up report on our state's biggest food bank. As a secondary topic, I would also interject that our local media used the "failure" as a way to appeal for people to bring their Y2K storage items into the bank. That's an idea that is borne from heart, but erroneous in our newly found self- sustainable logic. There are some alternatives to this idea offered in the thread:

http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=002DsC

on this forum.

Jen B.

-- Jennifer Bunker (Salt Lake City, Utah) (Jen@bunkergroup.com), January 07, 2000.