How concerned is Jamie O'Rourke about the Y2K computer bug?
Enough to sell his million-dollar home near Nashville with its pool and tennis courts, pack up his wife and children, and move [from their 9,000-square-foot home] into a double-wide trailer on 350 acres ...
Mrs. O'Rourke said her friends joke that she's like Eva Gabor from the old "GREEN Acres" TV comedy about urban sophisticates taking up a rustic life ...
How did all of this change come about?
It got started a little more than a year ago when friends mentioned the millennium bug to O'Rourke, and at first he did not understand.
"I said, 'Well, if it's a computer problem, I have computer people and ... they'll let me know," said O'Rourke, who employs 30 at his Brentwood office and another 100 at a plant in Mexico ...
"And that's kind of where I left it," he said, until last summer when some of his customers -- Wal-Mart, Kmart, Target and Toys R Us -- sent letters asking whether his company would be Y2K compliant. His bank asked, too.
He read more about Y2K and started paying close attention when "credible" people such as Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan talked about it.
Then he found some people he knew were stockpiling food and buying wood stoves, just in case. He was disappointed they hadn't told him but he understood why.
"They didn't want to be thought of as foolish or extremist," O'Rourke said ...
greenspun.com
The Oakland Press -- Page A-11
Cheryl
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