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Jo Anne Effect Struck Us
asked in the TimeBomb 2000 (Y2000) Q&A Forum
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yesterday, january 4th, my husband navigated through the snowdrifts to get to the office (we live in northern indiana). he got frantic phone calls from 2 clients with accounting problems. after they explained their problems, he told them they were experiencing the "jo anne" effect, and told them how to do a temporary fix, which worked (look ahead 9 months instead of 12). they then asked why he hadn't warned them of the problem. he said, " 3 letters, 2 phone calls, my newsletter, AND a december special weren't enough to convince you?" guess what, they signed up for the december special at the (higher) january price. i'm sure there will be others who will find a problem as soon as they are able to get to the office; many businesses were closed yesterday due to the snow emergency.
-- jocelyne slough (jonslough@tln.net), January 05, 1999
Answers
Another (albeit small) example:
I was in attendance as guest speaker on the Y2k issue at a City Council board meeting for a nearby community. One of the board members is a pharmacist. During my presentation, he added an interesting comment. He mentioned that late in the morning a one-year prescription had been entered into the clinic pharmacy computer. It had an expiration date early in January, 2000. He said that the 2000 date "crashed their computer program and trashed the data base so badly that they had to call the software manufacturer to help get it going again". The pharmacist said it took the rest of the day to recover the data. (Yes .. they were backed up, but there was about 4 hours' worth of new data entered that wasn't on the backup tapes.)
He concluded with an interesting comment. He said that their pharmacy software had been "guaranteed to be year 2000 ready" by the vendor and that they had assured him that it had been "thoroughly tested". When he presented the vendor with the situation that crashed their pharmacy data base .. the vendor replied .. "oh .. we didn't think of that".
They promised him that a fix was "on the way".
Nuff sed.
-- Dan (DanTCC@Yahoo.com), January 05, 1999.
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