Y2K: The Road to Oblivion?

by Wayne McEachren

So, hands up, everyone who hasn’t yet heard of the Y2K bug . . . Hmmm, that’s what I thought. You’ll forgive me then for not wasting precious real estate to provide you with yet another definition/ explanation of the problem. Let it suffice to say, some nearsighted programmers messed up and as a result we’re all going to die. Yes sir, looks like this is it, the Big One; in a little over a year it all goes poof. After all, thousands of articles and dozens of books forecasting civilization’s downfall as a result of two missing date digits can’t be wrong, can they? These people wouldn’t exaggerate, would they? You can’t honestly tell me that writers would resort to extreme hyperbole just to make an article more entertaining? Nah. Skin me alive and bathe me in Borax and you still couldn’t make me believe that, not in a billion trillion eons. Really.

Despite the fact that the very physical laws of the Universe are going to turn inside-out on the morning of January 1, 2000, causing the Earth to go keblewey, there is one thing I can assure you: Penad, its office equipment, and every one of its pension systems are going to be just fine. See, the software architects and developers who designed and wrote our systems had the apparently unusual foresight to realize 1999 would, at some moment in time, cease being 1999 and, miraculously, become 2000. So they designed the systems to use 4 digit dates from day one. Mind you, just to make absolutely and totally and completely and utterly certain of their compliance, we have tested them and re-tested them, we have consulted the oracle and called the psychic help line, and though we stopped short of divination with goat entrails, we ensure you that our systems will function with their usual perfection for at least another thousand years. And, if requested, we will be happy to send you a written, and signed, guarantee of their compliance. Furthermore, as a company that has always been very quick to upgrade to the latest technologies, our servers and workstations are all of recent make and model and have been given a clean bill of health. Even the building in which Penad holds court is less than ten years old.

Therefore, if you are an administrator using one of our systems, don’t be concerned. And if you are a retired member of a plan being so administered, breath easy; you won’t wake up some morning to find a pension bill for a million dollars snuggled among the flyers in your mailbox, instead of the expected cheque.

And when, on the morning of the new millenium, the world explodes, before you go spiraling off into the infinite reaches of space, take a peek into the window of that big green-glassed building drifting by. We will all be there, sitting at our fully functional workstations, happily administering pension plans with our bug-free pension software. That’ll be me in the corner office, the red-haired guy hunched in front of the monitor topped by a Marvin-the-Martian figurine. I'll wave if I see you.