A friend of mine runs a small IT business. In the last few months he has been swamped with Y2k audits and recently backups. Needless to say he has seen a lot of work come out of the Y2K issue. Before finishing up for the year he indicated that he would stop in to check on some of his customers-Jan 1.

He checked a local video store and asked if there where any problems. They said no but he decided to have a look any way. Their system operates with one master computer and two slaves. The master (IBM) was fine but the two slaves had reverted back to 1984.They decided to do an overdue print out and found that the 15 customers that had booked out movies that morning had over dues dating back for 16 years (the movies are booked out on the slaves, the print outs are done from the master).

His fix was to set the computers to ask for date and time on boot up.

What gets me here is that the people running the store had no idea that they had a problem until some one came in to check it out.

In regards to fire at the Australian power plant, just remember that we are in the middle of our summer over here and have had our hottest month on record for December in the west. We also have some large fires (bushland) in the south west of Australia. I really doubt this one is Y2K.

Also, Monday is a public holiday over here.

Lastly, I am a newbie to this forum (2 days) but I have to ask.

Whats a TROLL and a GI?

-- Dinky Dunk (iquitsmokong@newyears.eve), January 02, 2000

Answers

A friend of mine who lives near Albany, NY told me that a house in her area burned down due to Y2K problems with the microwave oven. The entire family is out in the cold, though donations are being accepted to help them out. So much for everything going smoothly with Y2K, tell that to this family!

-- Rhonda (rhlivingston@aol.com), January 02, 2000.

Dinky, I own video rental stores in TX (they are small) we upgraded everything (so we thought) months ago. Every thing was tested, worked great. When we opened Sat morning. Our programs all showed 01-01-1985 Sat. our late fee list was huge, could not run report for month ending Dec.31,1999. Small mess. Is this a prelude of things to come for larger companies, I hope not. My son works for a computer repair company here and they have been swamped with calls since Dec.27th. mostly small business that waited until the last min.

-- Marli (can'tget@it.duh), January 02, 2000.