the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

BEWARE THE PROFITING PROPHET 199
began. The Internal Revenue Ser vice discovered 175 glitches in its com-
puter systems, including one that would have caused tax notices to go out
with a due date of 2099. Southern California Edison discovered that sensors
throughout its power grid might fail, causing small-scale blackouts in
some parts of the region. (Beyond that, repair crews wouldn’t be able to
tell which lines were dead and which still had current coursing through
them, possibly endangering their lives.) Ultimately, U.S. companies would
spend $125 billion between 1997 and 2000 making sure such calamities
didn’t occur. The federal government would spend $8.5 billion.
But in many instances, it turned out that the Y2K bug didn’t present
a serious threat. Aircraft manufacturers, for example, found that
planes wouldn’t fall out of the sky, because crucial electronic systems on
planes didn’t depend on having accurate dates. Hospitals found that defi -
brillators and other lifesaving equipment would work, even if the devices
registered the wrong date. The eight major U.S. telephone companies at
the time conducted 1,700 tests of their systems in 1998 and 1999, and
found only seven Y2K bugs, most of which were quickly fixed. The personal
computers on office workers’ desks were usually too new to contain
Y2K bugs, and the older ones could usually be easily fixed. Thus, by the
late 1990s, computing experts worked overtime to assure a nervous public
that the world wasn’t about to end. In December 1997, for example, PC
Week writer Michael Surkan wrote that “in all but an exceedingly small
number of cases, these date bugs will cause little (if any) real damage.” A
yearlong U.S. Senate investigation concluded in February 1999 that while
not all Y2K problems had been fixed, “talk of the death of civilization, to
borrow from Mark Twain, has been greatly exaggerated.”
Lawn Sprinklers Gone Berserk!
But the reassuring voices of experts were drowned out by the shrill
voices proclaiming that all hell was about to break loose. The mainstream
media quickly glommed on to a story it had ignored for years. Newsweek
was among the first to pour lighter fluid on public anxiety with a June