the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

Lesson #18
BEWARE THE
PROFITING PROPHET
the y2k scare
To nervous Americans on the eve of the 21st century, a
couple of missing digits in a computer program foretold
a looming techno- apocalypse. So a few entrepreneurs did
what they do best: turned fear into cash.
YOU MAY HAVE been one of those people who woke up on the
morning of January 1, 2000, and flipped on the TV to discover that civilization
had not disintegrated into chaos. You may even have felt a bit of
buyer’s remorse. That $1,495 twelve-month supply of dried beans and
fruit, the $7,000 “survival dome” tent, the boxes of shotgun shells and
hundreds of rolls of toilet paper that you stashed in the basement—which
undoubtedly would have been prized commodities for barter, had the
apocalypse arrived as predicted—suddenly didn’t seem like such wise
purchases after all. But you can take solace in this: You may have been
bamboozled by the prophets of doom, but you weren’t alone.
Millions of other Americans were similarly convinced that their
computers’ inability to distinguish between the years 2000 and 1900—a
software glitch that became known as the Y2K bug—would trigger a cataclysmic
upheaval. A January 1999 Time/CNN poll reported that nearly
60 percent of Americans were “somewhat” to “very” concerned about
Y2K. An even more astonishing finding: one in ten Americans expected
Y2K to bring the end of the world as we know it—or “TEOTWAWKI,”