Friend could not process end-of-week Zon Jr. totals. Zon could only began totaling at mid-week and could not reconcile. Had to turn off and call cust. serv. This happened for several retail stores within the chain of in WA state.

Hewlet-Packard credit union visa is screwed up. Friend can't access account or use card for purchases. Friend lives in Oregon. Credit union/visa located..?

Wells Fargo lost an account. Could not find any trace of it. Don't know as yet whether it was reconciled... Wells Fargo located WA state.

My visa/debit card no longer works in ATM. Give me invalide pin message. This problem started 3 weeks ago. I got a new pin # and still not work as of 12/31/99. (My ATM receipts have a mm/dd/yy format) By the body lanuage and voice inflection of bank mgr. I get the idea that I'm not the only one. On the 30th I spoke with an ATM tech. whom was trying to fix the drive up ATM at my bank. He was baffled and told me it would be 5 minute wait, maybe longer. After 45 minutes he was still there, looking most perplexed. US Bank branch located SW WA state. Friends radio in truck (blaupunkttt) went ker-plunk on fm display shortly before mid-nite. Began displaying gibberish for fm freq. display. Otherwise, Okay.

Wait and see. The economy is the real test. Takes time for gears and bearings to grind down within the economic crankcase/gearbox. Or something like that. Don't believe the happy-happy,joy-joy reports you see on the news. That's propaganda for the sheeple. Baa-Baa The herd will turn when shortages occur, and maybe not even then.

love and peace mrbunker

-- mrbunker (mrbunker@saferthanmost.com), January 01, 2000

Answers

My Blaupunkt works fine.

-- spider (spider0@usa.net), January 01, 2000.

HP credit union is located in Palo Alto, Calif.

-- Zygote (zygote@zygote.zygote), January 01, 2000.

My ancient Litton microwave (about 18 years old) bit the dust.

The seismic event website is dtata non-functioning. Looks like the format is yy:

http://www.iris.washington.edu/cgi-bin/seismon_events.pl?date=98/11/27 &lat=40.60N&lon=125.19W

Lights did flicker on and off around midnight, but subsequently ok

-- marsh (armstrng@sisqtel.net), January 01, 2000.

At a multi-millionaire friend's home for New Year's Eve party, he was doing "I told you so's" about Y2K having no effect on power, water, etc. He's a brilliant RPI (engineering) and MIT (computer systems) graduate who works with computer systems for a living and claims his programs have been designed to avoid Y2K problems for over a decade! But he didn't have an answer for my response: "I work for xxx (one of the largest corporations in the world). Every one of our plants and office buildings has been closed since December 23. How can you be so sure we will have no major Y2K problems when we return to work January 3?"

-- Richard Greene (RGreene2@ford.com), January 01, 2000.

And what is not stated... How many of these problems are Y2K-related? And are they IV&V'd?? As a Credit Union I.S. Manager, I find it hard to believe that body language and an ATM Tech are sufficient to cause alarm. Our ATM in Philly was down for 3 weeks... but not due to Y2K! *I* know!

-- Tom (geektom@pcgeek.net), January 01, 2000.

I'm not an expect at all, but it was my understanding that Y2K- related problems could start before the rollover. Also, from the experiences that I've had at my job, new replacement software doesn't fully work when it has not been completely designed and tested. And I say that is Y2K related.

-- Mello1 (Mello1@ix.netcom.com), January 01, 2000.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait,.................

-- Lars (lars@indy.net), January 01, 2000.

My contribution:

My husband's 'doomer buddy' got him a "Y2k Countdown" ballcap last spring. On Wednesday, just before the stroke of midnight, it started beeping as the seconds counted down. (It startled me; it had been conveniently put on the top of a filing cabinet here in my home office and was all but forgotten.) When I figured out where, exactly, the beeping was coming from, the clock on the cap was flashing "Happy 2000". LOL, an embedded chip failure on a countdown clock hat!

-- Wilferd (WilferdW@aol.com), January 01, 2000.

Perhaps I'm mistaken, but it almost seems as if people are unhappy that we had so few Y2K related problems. Before 1/1/2000, most were predicting an end-of-world scenario. Now that it hasn't happened, instead of being happy and enjoying the new year, we are hearing doom and gloom predictions that could last until 12/31/2000.

I've worked in the IT field for 10+ years. I'm part of a team that was formed years ago to discover, fix, and test all Y2K related problems in our systems. This past year we have worked very hard to ensure that 1/1/2000 would find all our systems operational. Similar teams have done the same things in businesses around the world.

To Those Who Are Saying Wait Until (fill-in-the-date):

In order to test for any Y2K related errors we had to create testing situations with the system clocks rolled forward. Has anyone thought about the fact that maybe, while we were testing, we tested SEVERAL dates in 2000? We tested dates from 1/1/2000 - 12/31/2000 that we thought could cause problems. For example, leap year. So, we aren't wondering what will happen when ... we tested for it. I'm sure others did the same as we did and tested several dates, not just one.

To Those Who Say wait Until Monday:

We are requiring all departments to use this weekend as a last test before business on Monday. Each department had to indicate who they had designated and what they would test. Final testing this weekend is NOT optional. I'm sure the same is true for most other business. All testing to be completed by midnight Saturday 1/1/2000.

What If Bugs Appear Later:

Most of us in the IT field fix bugs every day. We have daily and weekly deadlines. Some people in my company are paid by the hour and expect a weekly check. What do we do when things break and it's payroll night? We fix things. Just like we'll fix any of the minor things that may arise throughout the year because of Y2K.

We keep things running every day (or try to). I have no doubts my collegues will do the same in the year 2000.

Enjoy the new year and stop worrying!!

-- Chris Josephson (chrisj62954@aol.com), January 01, 2000.

Oh Chris, you're no fun.

-- Lars (lars@indy.net), January 02, 2000.

Yeah, what Lars said (both times).

I fix bugs every day, and I can't remember the last time it took me more than five minutes to fix one. The trouble is that it takes hours, days, weeks to find the little rascals. The real nasties are those that you don't even notice until they've (for example) chewed up half of your records or (ouch) slowly degraded then killed the voicemail capacity on your phone switch.

A personal gripe: I get all of my field reports from tech support drones who are really just glorified salesmen who know enough buzzwords (but not their meanings) to cloud the issues. The minimum time for a bug to get reported from the field, analysed, fixed, and a patch rolled out is two weeks. A more usual figure would be six months.

There are no quick fixes.

-- Servant (public_service@yahoo.com), January 02, 2000.

I think when people read about how long it can take to uncover and fix bugs it gives the impression that this is how long some systems could be down if/when some Y2K-related bugs appear. This can cause people to fear that many computer-based systems are still at risk for massive failure.

While it is true that bugs can be difficult to fix, it's also true that we deal with this sort of thing all the time, yet still manage to have our systems available. We could never allow, for example, the payroll or pension systems to be unavailable because we are working on debugging them. We'd be out of a job. Therefore, we have developed ways to ensure our systems are available when they need to be.

We have never missed a deadline throughout the years I have been here. Have we had bugs in our systems? Of course we have. We have a daily deadline of 8AM every day. Systems have to be up, running, and available for our clients' use. We deal with problems our clients are not even aware we had. That's our job.

If anyone gets a paycheck on a regular basis, do you think it's because the payroll system (payroll system=application, operating system, database and hardware) never had a problem or bug? Of course not.

Whatever problems may still be lurking will be dealt with and probably nobody will even notice.

-- Chris Josephson (chrisj62954@aol.com), January 02, 2000.