The only legitimate millennium bug I heard was caused by failure to put in a vendor mainframe software patch. This situation delayed batch processing for 20 minutes, with zero cost to the government and zero impact to customers. By the way, I do not consider any disruption to, much less error, in service affecting even one of our customers acceptable. But since those inconvenienced customers left pharmacies with their prescriptions filled, a health care disaster it wasn't. The meaning of this past week seems clear enough.
Computers fail all the time, in all sorts of ways.
For example, PC batteries wear-out, mimicking symptoms of the desktop real time clock Y2K situation. Over the next couple months, one challenge is to gear up for the large number of customers who are going to be contacting us for reassurance, and for paper documentation of financial information, due to the widespread millenium-related misconceptions so ably debunked by Ratcliffe's article. Plus there's the continuing need to accumulate a paper trail showing due diligence in case of being hit by a Y2K-related lawsuit. Plus, there's the continuing need to placate the legion of Y2K auditors from the General Accounting Office, Inspector General, contractor consultant organizations, etc. who visit me looking for chinks in our Y2K armor. It is true that when, this week, I discovered misprocessing, I didn't call Public Affairs.