Editorial 1.7, July 1999, by Deirdre Helfferich Bugs in Winter At the Spring E.C.A. meeting, a member of the community brought up what I thought was a pertinent topic: the Y2K bug and whether Ester should have a community backup plan (so to speak), just in case. Unfortunately, this was at the end of an already long and boisterous meeting, and I could hear stomachs growling in anticipation of the barbeque just outside on the porch. The idea was given short shrift, derailed by the wonderful smells and a question of order. The meeting adjourned, to pretty much everyone’s relief. However, the subject did get explored a tiny bit afterwards, and the reaction seemed to be almost uniformly along the lines of, "Aah, come on. It’s silly to panic. Let’s eat." Well, visions of Armaggedon are one thing, but rose-tinted glasses are another. When those three zeroes roll around, quite a bit of clonky old software and hardware is going to hiccup. Some of it will sneakily eat vital data while pretending innocently that nothing’s amiss, and some will roll over and play dead. A minority will cause really nasty problems. Now, while some people are selling their worldly possessions and preparing for the end of the world, (stocking up on ammo, food, water, medicines, gasoline, Geiger counters, bubblegum cards, and other essentials), some people are doing nothing, assuming with blasé indifference that it won’t affect them. Many know they’ll have problems with their electronics, but can’t afford to deal with it right now, or have only just started to address it, or are finding that the problem is trickier than they thought. A lot of people are sending out junk mail assuring me that my bank, credit card company, insurance company, electric utility, and so forth, are proceeding with all due speed to be "Y2K ready." Oh, boy, that’s a relief. I can relax, knowing that my bills will continue to plague me. Yet, even here in Ester, the Y2K bug has already struck, creating temporary havoc in a local business for about a week. Not a big problem, and fixable, but it took time. Every once in a while now you hear about problems like this. Some are minor inconveniences, like not being able to get gas from an automatic gas pump, some not so minor. Imagine that happening all over the world, all at once. Lots of little problems, all compounding each other. It all boils down to massive, temporary inconvenience. The more hands, or rather, the more computer chips and computer programs, that something has to pass through to get to us, the longer it will take to fix the problem. The guy in Hawaii growing pine-apples, for example, takes a couple of weeks to deal with his crashing computer. Then he has to play catch-up. The shipper, meanwhile, has been dealing with his own crashes, and is trying to sort out his billing. Say maybe they get it all fixed in three weeks. So at the very least, that means that the fresh pineapple you were going to use for your brother’s birthday cake isn’t available for a month, and you have to buy canned. Now think about that. A minor inconvenience compounded a thousand times can end up being a pretty big one when you’re at the end of the supply chain. Alaska is way the heck and gone so far as the rest of the world is concerned, and we all know that the Lower 48 thinks we’re in Canada somewhere. People are going to be pretty busy worrying about getting stuff to people in the same county, never mind some foreigners up north. Anything that does come up is going to go to Anchorage first, so we may be out of things for a while. So maybe a community plan, or at least a community preparedness, makes sense. It wouldn’t hurt to see that we have a little extra in our larders, or to make sure our neighbors know what kind of help we can give them if they need it. Maybe stocking up on things like medical supplies or repairing that extra generator wouldn’t be a bad idea. And remember, folks, this will all hit in the middle of the winter. We may be in for a rough one. | ||
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