Bakersfield company stung by Y2K bug Filed: August 24, 1999
By MARC BENJAMIN Californian staff writer e-mail: mbenjamin@bakersfield.com
Y2K glitches happen to even the most computer savvy folks.
Wayne Moule, president of Northwest Metrology, a company that calibrates electronic test equipment for federal agencies and major corporations, is a case in point. Moule sees the damage every day and still is counting losses - $80,000 and growing - because software he owns fell victim to a year 2000 problem. The glitch occurs when the year 2000 appears as "00" in the date field of a computer, and the date is read as the year 1900.
Not only has the Y2K difficulty cost Moule money, but it has set his H Street and Golden State Highway business weeks behind in servicing efforts.
And he wants other business owners to know they should take Y2K seriously.
"Be prepared because it shut us down the first two weeks of January," he said. "We weren't prepared for it. It wasn't even in our minds ... But after January 1 it became a mainstay in our lives."
Moule is not alone.
Claudia Wilkerson's date with destiny occurred April 1. But it was no April Fool's joke.
She did not know the software overseeing her pool servicing records would fail at the start of the second quarter, the beginning of her busy season. It took her business, with 1,300 customers, almost three months to recover.
"I am just getting to the end of it," she said. "Just my time on the phone was huge trying to appease everyone."
As Wilkerson will attest, computers and software with date sensitivity is nothing to trifle with.
"I didn't realize software that was 5 years old is just a dinosaur," she said, after losing about $20,000. "I couldn't bill anyone, so I had no money coming and I had to deal with my creditors."
Wilkerson is telling everyone she knows to get their businesses prepared for the year 2000.
"I didn't just lose everything - it put me in the year 2010 and when I tried to transfer the data to my new software, there was something in the files that didn't transfer it so I had to input everything by hand," she said. "I don't think year 2000 will be a major apocalypse, but people are going to be affected."
As for Moule, he said he conducted a Y2K test on his computers late last year and found them to be in sound working condition. But in the first week of January, he learned differently.
"There wasn't a problem," he said, as he stood behind a counter with a microwave frequency counter, temperature calibrator and modulation analyzer in front of him. "But I have hard proof there is a problem."
Moule's computers are programmed a year ahead because much of the equipment testing conducted by the company is calibrated on an annual basis and the federal government audits machinery Northwest Metrology calibrates.
"Our paperwork was wrong," he said, referring to dates on each analysis conducted by his company. "We shut down the first two weeks of January. We couldn't hand out paperwork or do any calibrations."
Initially, a customer noticed the date problem, and within days the government was knocking on his door.
"We used the same software for eight or nine years and then some federal agency calls us and tells us our data is all wrong," Moule said.
All data the company kept in its computers with Y2K problems had to be manually typed back into the company's computers using handwritten back-up documents, he said.
"It was nine years of data, and I guess the only thing good about it is that we had back-up documents," Moule said.
But the work of typing the information back into the computers is time-consuming and monotonous. It also put the three-employee firm further behind in its work.
"We are pushing our on-site (calibration) schedule up," he said. "It's taking longer because we have to re-input all this data."
Rick Kreiser, president of Carney's Business Technology in Bakersfield, said many of his company's steady clients may not be fixing their year 2000 problems.
"Less than 50 percent of (300) clients we speak with have addressed it in any meaningful manner," Kreiser said. "Our assessment service program is winding down and the time to think and plan is getting short. The long process is becoming a much more truncated, shorter process."
He said the issues are more than fixing computers and ensuring software reliability, but also making sure suppliers are ready, too. He said major corporations are spending millions to fix potential problems.
"If this whole thing is just a non-issue, we have hopefully taken advantage of the time to do something positive for our businesses, even if it's unbudgeted or unplanned," Kreiser said. "But I didn't cook this up and neither did Bill Gates."
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Here is a system that was tested for Y2K compliance and still failed. How many other companies that have tested their software for Y2K compliance will suddenly realize that they still have Y2K problems?
Notice that these failures were not fixed in 2-3 days!
B.K. |
