>>"When we told the programmers they'd have to come in that night, they all said, 'What's the use? There's not going to be any power or any telephone service,' " he says.<<
Between the WSJ and the New York Times, press coverage of Y2K has soared recently. Here's today's WSJ story:
BTW, Cincinnati Financial is the holding company for Cincinnati Insurance, the insurer that just sued a policy holder over Y2K liability!! That is, that Cinn. Insurance doesn't have any. This separate story mysteriously did not make it into the archives of the WSJ Briefing Book on the company. However, it is on Yahoo!:
biz.yahoo.com.
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As Y2K Bash Rages Next Year,
Techies Will Party Like It's 1999
By LEE GOMES
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
This time next year, it will be the Party of the Millennium, and naturally, Mike Markovich has big plans.
Mr. Markovich runs the computer system at F. Korbel & Bros. Inc., the California champagne maker. As Korbel-swilling crowds gather in New York's Times Square, he plans to be at work, staring at a monitor, making sure his mainframe computer doesn't pop its cork at midnight.
"It's going to be dark and lonely where I am," he sighs. "The irony has not been lost on me."
Nor has it been lost on the perhaps hundreds of thousands of other high-tech workers for whom next New Year's Eve will be all about the Year 2000 problem -- not about a Year 2000 party.
Join the Discussion: Is the Year 2000 problem all hype or a horror waiting to happen?
Should the world's power stations, computers and building-control systems go berserk when their internal calendars roll over next year, technologists everywhere need to be hunkered down and sobered up. Forget the confetti and the champagne toasts. The price to pay for working with the technology of the future is not being able to properly welcome the future when it actually arrives.
"It's the biggest date change in a hundred years, and everyone wants to be out celebrating," says Mike Hrastinski, chief information officer at Symantec Corp., a Cupertino, Calif., software maker. "The last thing you want to say 30 years from now is, 'I spent the big night watching the computer network.' " Yet that's exactly what many of the Symantec computer crew will be doing, their numbers chosen by lot.
Of course, for nurses or public-safety officials, there's nothing new about having to pull a holiday shift. But for many in the elite white-collar world of technology, it's a new experience. This time, many will have to make sacrifices of millennial proportions.
In Gulfport, Miss., Jamie Dent, Y2K special-projects coordinator for Halter Marine Group Inc., a shipbuilder, says he isn't going to be able to join his wife, child and friends on a long-planned Caribbean getaway. With even a remote chance of some techno-catastrophe, "I didn't think it would look to good to say, 'If you need me, you can reach me at the Grand Cayman resort,' " says Mr. Dent.
There's a silver lining to these forced New Year's plans. Since many nontechie spouses will be stranded at home without a date, they won't have to tackle that other Y2K problem: finding a baby sitter. A year from now, while Chuck Repsher's wife, Robyn, is working in the Lake County, Ore., information-services department, Mr. Repsher will be spending the evening at home playing Monopoly and gin rummy with the couple's two sons, Jason and Keith -- maybe even popping open a bottle of sparking cider.
At least the stranded spouses can take consolation in the fact that the night will bring an end, finally, to a long stretch of Y2K widowhood. "This whole deal with the Year 2000 has made family life real hard," says Gary Ingram, who is Robyn Repsher's boss.
To keep from being total New Year's grinches, companies are trying to make the late evening feel a bit more bubbly than a regular day at the office. Robert McClanahan, manager of technology-information systems for the Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corp. in Little Rock says he will be treating his staff to a New Year's feast from Corky's, a popular neighborhood barbecue spot. Sure, it's a night without booze, music or kisses, but "the idea of free food and a day off a week or so later helps make up for it," Mr. McClanahan says hopefully.
Officials at Cincinnati Financial Corp., an insurance holding company, have rented a suite of rooms at the Holiday Inn across the street from their headquarters. That's so staffers can have a low-key gathering and still be available in case of trouble. Small children like Holiday Inns for special occasions -- great swimming pools -- but adults? A Cincinnati Financial spokesman says gallows humor about the night is seeping out already. "When we told the programmers they'd have to come in that night, they all said, 'What's the use? There's not going to be any power or any telephone service,' " he says.
Most organizations are planning for an alcohol-free event, although Lee Woolsey, manager of information services for Wells Rural Electric in Well, Nev., says he will scout around for a "Y2K-compliant beer."
Some are making a real attempt to look on the bright side. The computer operators at the headquarters of Rohm & Haas Co., maker of specialty chemicals, will be working a year from now on the fifth floor of a building overlooking Independence Hall in Philadelphia. "The view of the fireworks that night is going to be spectacular," says Robert Stocks, Year 2000 project coordinator for the company.
Just because people plan to be at work 12 months hence, however, doesn't mean they expect big problems. Most are already working around the clock to make sure their systems are bug-free. Still, precautions must be taken. A bug might have slipped through. Or the building's power might go out. Or another company's computer may fail -- and take others down with it. "I don't trust that everyone in the world will be as well tested as we are," says Chuck Gustaitis, information-systems director at Gencor Industries in Orlando, Fla.
The people who will deserve the most sympathy that night, says Jeff Brune of Washington Water Power Co., won't be desk-bound computer jockeys. They, at least, will be indoors and warm, unlike the field-service workers Mr. Brune is going to have to dispatch that night to keep an eye on his utility company's far-flung field equipment. "It's going to be midnight," he says, "and some poor soul is going to be sitting alone out in the cold at some substation someplace, waiting for something to happen."
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