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You know the ones.
They were running around charging people money to hear their expert opinions.
One of them came to Warsaw.
He was talking about all this inside information he had. He said the government was lying to us. The government was telling us everything would be OK, but that was all just a front. The government knew there would be mass chaos and he could prove it.
He had insider documents and intercepted memos - blah, blah, blah.
And that will be $19.95, please.
Where are those guys? And how can they look at themselves in the mirror?
The Y2K experience was mostly a chuckle for me. Some of the stuff that went wrong was really pretty funny.
Computers in an Italian prison noted that prisoners due for release this month had been detained 100 years too long and should have been released in 1900.
Prisoners released in December 1999 should have been detained for another 100 years, the computer said.
The first baby born in Denmark was listed as 100 years old by a hospital computer.
Breathalyzers in Hong Kong stopped working after midnight on Dec. 31 because data fields wouldn't accept birth dates before 2000.
Taxi meters in China's Jiangsu province stopped working at midnight.
Customers at video rental stores in South Korea and upstate New York were charged late fees calculated from 1900, and slot machines briefly went blank in Delaware.
Even here in the newsroom, when I came to work Monday morning, the Associated Press graphics had a goofy little Y2K glitch.
The folders where the graphics were stored for Friday and Saturday were labeled 99-12-31 and 100-01-01. By Sunday, they had it right. The folder was labeled 00-01-02 and it's been right ever since.
Pretty much everything else, from airlines to elevators, ATMs to power grids, functioned properly.
But the stockpiling of food and ammunition, the burying of money and the purchases of everything from guns to generators tells us something unsettling about ourselves.
We are a bit superstitious and paranoid, aren't we?
Think about it. What was Y2K really all about? It was all about computer glitches. Why would computer glitches cause general anarchy? Why would computer glitches cause people to rise up in angry mobs and attack each other?
That is a bizarre leap in logic and it's difficult for me to understand. But lots of people believed that.
And why would it have been such a horrible thing if, for example, the power went out for a few days?
Are we so dependent on others for our existence that we couldn't fend for ourselves for a week or so?
Even if there were Y2K problems, wouldn't banding together with neighbors be a better way to deal with them than locking yourself in your home with a shotgun and a stockpile of food and ammunition?
And one more thing.
Will these people who think the millennium really doesn't begin until 2001 climb down off their high horses, please?
They call everybody who celebrated last week stupid. They say we've all been lied to by the media and we are too dumb to realize it, as if it were some big conspiracy.
That's not the case at all. We know about the Gregorian calendar. We know about the "no zero year" thing. How could we not? Every major news organization in the world did a story on it.
It was on AP, CNN, Headline News, the 700 Club, all the networks and in most newspapers.
Fidel Castro agrees that the new millennium won't begin until 2001. The daily Juventud Rebelde - the state newspaper in Cuba that always agrees with Castro, of course - speculated that 'the world celebrated the millennium ahead of time, perhaps with commercial aims that nobody spoke about. ... The immense investment in computers was nothing more than an audacious market maneuver.'
Yeah, that's it. This whole thing was a conspiracy to make us buy more computers. Wink. Wink.
It's not that we're too dumb to realize that Pope Gregory made up the calendar in 1582 to correct the Julian calendar that Julius Caesar worked out in 46 B.C. We know that Gregory started his calendar at 1-1-1 instead of 1-1-0. We know there are discrepancies. It's just that we don't care, OK? 2000 looks and sounds like a new millennium. 2001 doesn't.
I think the Headline News piece I saw summed it up best.
The reporter, after explaining in great detail the whole Gregorian calendar thing, said, "Perhaps the new millennium doesn't begin for another year, but who's counting?"
Don't you just love such overt civil disobedience?
So for all you people who are incensed by that - who think the rest of us are unenlightened boors who can't count - maybe next year you could all head down to Cuba and party with Castro when he rings in the true millennium.
