But time and again he's found the alarming anecdotes can't be confirmed. Oh, there may be some real problems, Hewitt told me. But whatever they are, they will be of the typical, manageable and inevitable kind we already live through every day. Y2K tests in which there have been short-lived breakdowns but things were quickly back up and running bear this out, he said. Every day, subway trains break down.
Bills get mixed up.
Reservations get lost. Even airport radar systems crash. Many Y2K alarmists think embedded chips, or tiny computers buried in everything from microwave ovens to communication cables lying deep in the ocean, present the biggest threat of all. But even now they regularly fail and are fixed. Still, evangelicals continue the alarm.