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The Millennium Bug

© Bonny Albo

Statistics Canada says that 50 per cent of small Canadian firms have done nothing about the Millennium Bug, even though 90 per cent of all businesses are aware of the problem. Are you one of them?

The Millennium Bug, also called Y2K, was discovered a number of years ago in the UK, at a supermarket chain. A barcode was scanned with an expiry date in the year 2000, and this froze the machine that scanned it. Scary? Of course. Could it happen to you? Most definitely.

But how could something like this happen? Quite easily, it seems. Programmers, in the days where memory was scarce, programmed dates as being identified by two digits, such as "81" for 1981, or "98" for 1998. This would mean that the year 2000 would appear as "00" - and this is where the problem lies. When the year 2000 expiry date popped up, the computer read "00" as the year 1900, and froze.

After hearing of this problem last year, I thought to myself, "So what? That does not affect me." But now, after researching the phenomenon of the millennium bug a little bit, I cringe at my own ignorance. The simple task of calling my family on New Year's Eve to wish everyone a happy new year could create a huge headache for both me and my long distance provider. How? Well, if the call lasted past midnight, the long distance company's systems might read that instead of making a 10-minute phone call, I had made a 100-year long phone call.

And this problem encompasses more than just long distance. Think of all of the things in our lives that are time sensitive: mortgages, driver license renewals, bill payments, medical instrumentation, purchase orders, VCR programming, and answering machines, just to name a few. And when you couple this with the files that can be lost due to a total systems crash, and you have a serious problem.

With less than 92 weeks until the new millennium, no one, especially those of us who work at home, can afford to wait any longer before rectifying this problem. Yes, your business insurance may cover you for a "business interruption," but counting on it probably isn't the way to go.

But what to do about it? The Year 2000: Will your PC crash? provides a quick and easy test to do on a DOS-based system to determine whether or not you and your computer systems are at risk. Backing up all of your irreplaceable information somewhere else just in case, however, would definitely be prudent.

The copyright of the article The Millennium Bug in Work-at-Home Parents is owned by Bonny Albo. Permission to republish The Millennium Bug in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.