By David Gewirtz
We got an ... interesting ... call today. Back in 1992 or so, one of my old companies sold software products. One such product was a library of 1,200 or so icons (you know, the cute little color graphic images) called Icon Gallery.
One winter season (I think it was '93), we decided to give away a bunch of winter and holiday-themed icons (about 30 of them) by posting them on CompuServe (there wasn't really much of a Web back then). You'd download these things and you could pretty-up your desktop with them. We called this free gift, as I was reminded today, "Winter Fun".
"Brains are necessary here, people. Y2K can be overcome and we'll live nicely through it if we're just not stupid."
So today I get a call from a very serious woman representing a large organization whose apparent Y2K preparation process was to have someone call and demand written Y2K compliance statements from all their software suppliers. So this woman called and demanded we write a detailed document describing our compliance strategy for "Winter Fun". I couldn't resist. "Winter Fun is not Y2K compliant, therefore there will be no winter", I told her. I played with her a bit more, in varying counter-productive, karma-burning, yes-I-have-a-houseboat-on-the-lake-of-fire sorts of ways.
But as I thought about it later, I became more and more appalled.
How could anyone in their right mind have allowed "Winter Fun" to show up on a list of Y2K compliance issues? Wouldn't time be better spent on "guaranteed power" or "Darned right there'll be fresh food," or "Yes, we'll be able to print paychecks," or any of the other more pressing requirements?
Brains are necessary here, people. Y2K can be overcome and we'll live nicely through it if we're just not stupid. I'll be honest, I was pretty confident that Y2K would be a mere blip until I got this call. But if people are this stupid four months before the zero hour, maybe I better stockpile some SpaghettiOs.
"Let's try not to put the fate of the world into the hands of a bunch of poorly-trained temps reading off a script."
So tonight, I decided to get on my soapbox. Hundreds of thousands of people read our publications. Maybe if we all started a "let's not be friggin' stupid" campaign, Y2K would work out fine. You're all pretty influential folks. Don't ignore your companies' Y2K efforts. Check into them. Make sure they're spending time making critical systems work and not screwing around with "Winter Fun". It really pisses me off that to many companies, Y2K preparation means having a bunch of temps collect compliance statements. Let's try not to put the fate of the world into the hands of a bunch of poorly-trained temps reading off a script.
OK? Good. Go do it. Now, please...
Thank you!
