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AuthorITies: Matter Of Fact


September 20, 1999

Whatever Gets You Through The Night

By Rusty Weston

You were thinking of taking off New Year's Eve? Forget it. If you're remotely involved in IT, you'll be working mentally, even if your spouse has made 11 o'clock reservations at Chez Luddite.

Working on New Year's Eve? Sure. Because you can't switch it off--your curiosity that is. You not only must know what's happening, you won't go completely offline. You'll want to know if the cell phones are working, the power grid's on, the gas is flowing, your company's Web site is up, and out of morbid curiosity, you may check CNN to see whether planes are crashing at the Moscow airport. (The truly paranoid among us will casually slip out of their dinner parties at 12:35 a.m., flip open their cell phones, and call their bank to check their meager balances.)

You might sip bubbly, you may even kiss your neighbor's insignificant other, but you won't unplug. Of course, by this loose metric, working could be defined as flying on the Concorde from Laguardia to Heathrow and back again just in time to see Dick Clark's hair catch on fire in a freak accident. Hey, it could happen, except you're not planning to fly that week, are you?

We can joke, but many IT professionals won't have the luxury of pretending not to work on this storied graveyard shift. To make the best of it, thoughtful IT managers will provide their team with a six-pack of Diet Coke and a sponge cake with a Y2K bug on it. Some companies will go even further: MBNA is planning to raffle off a few TV sets for its lucky crew. Meanwhile, on the left coast, Microsoft's IT staff will have a catered spread and a dance band. On the right coast, let's just say the Pentagon's IT recruits won't be doing the bump.

Speaking of Uncle Sam, the feds are saying their year 2000 remediation work is 97% done. At a cost of $8.34 billion to date. Can you guess where 43% of that money has gone? A hint: It's not for new year 2000-compliant Army port-a-potties. No, it's for Department of Defense remediation projects.

Federal officials downplay it, but IT professionals know this teensy, weensy 3% gap may matter enormously. The Office of Management and Budget recently conceded: "The interconnection of so many complex systems increases the likelihood that DoD will experience some Y2K difficulties." The upshot? If you're thinking about starting the first war of the new millennium, I'd recommend holding your fire until the testing is complete.

And for those of you looking to escape this techno-madness: It's time to cancel those flight reservations to Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai, Bombay, Moscow, or anywhere within a day's travel of the Ukraine. At least, that's what the government is telling us as a word to the wise.

In the grand scheme of things, it's probably best to stay at home, unplug your PC, drain your cell phone batteries, burn up all your Presto logs, and watch Stanley Kubrick videos while sipping champagne in bed. In the unlikely event you'll actually be able to relax, the first thing to do is check to see if your voice mail is still accepting messages.


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