Millennium Meltdown

Now that you're a Y2K expert, you should leaarn to sound like one. Here are some buzzwords culled from the voluminous writings on the impending crises:

Doomsdate(s): Calendar dates that may cause computers to malfunction, such as 1/1/00 (Y2K), 9/9/99 (four nines are used as a "stop" code in some programs) and 2/29/00 (the extra day in a turn-of-the-century leap year).

Triage: Prioritizing mission-critical systems to determine where to focus your Y2K-compliance efforts. ("We must triage our mission critical systems before preparing them for the doomsdate.")

Going Dark: To have computer systems, electric power grids or even whole business operations fail as a result of the Y2K bug. ("If the electric power utility companies don't finish up their compliance efforts in time, our company can plan on going dark for a while.")

Workaround: A contingency plan designed to keep a business open despite Y2K-related failures of vital systems. ("When the cash registers go dark, we can always use battery-powered calculators as a workaround.")

Domino Effect: The failure of a non-Y2K-compliant system causing the failure of a Y2K-compliant system. ("Our workaround didn't take the domino effect into account, causing our whole operation to go dark.")

Bug Out: Once used by the military to describe a hurried evacuation effort, it now means to leave the city for a remote rural area to avoid social upheaval caused by Y2K-related failures of essential services. ("After the food trucks stopped coming and our supermarket went dark, we decided to bug out.")

TEOTWAWKI: Y2K survivalist shorthand for "The End Of The World As We Know It."

Contact Sources

Larry Goldfarb, fargoprov@aol.com

Ed Yourdon, ed@yourdon.com, http://www.yourdon.com

Thanks to Wired magazine, Westergaard Year 2000 (http://www.y2ktimebomb.com) and author Ed Yourdon.

This article was originally published in the January 1999 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Millennium Meltdown.