Jamuary 1, 1999

Bug-free Zone

Our year 2000 compliance plan

As that the often-retreaded story of the Year 2000 Bug reached a point of total saturation - so that by year's end eventually every single person on the planet had been briefed on the phenomenon - 1999 will certainly be the year that we all hear the story again, and again. Scientists have calculated that there are precisely umpteen possible variations the phrase "internal clocks will be reset from '99' to '00'," and by the end of the year you will have heard them all. The simpleton staff was already hip to the implications of thousand-year changeovers the first time we rang in a new millenium, and we've been prepped for the millenium since our first day of publication. Like the Y2K bug itself, our solution was simple. As a then-daily publication, simpleton wouldn't go in for any lazy "98/12/25"-style file-naming. From the git-go, simpleton's files have been named in glorious, four-digit years. Just savor the pleasant, rounded completeness of a simpleton daily file: http://www.simpleton.com/19980116.html It may not seem like much, but consider that even the finest online publications still make do with a half-baked "98" or "99" naming convention. Are these folks so pessimistic about the possibility that they'll still be publishing in a hundred years? Or are they too optimistic about the prospects for improved naming conventions in the future? What are they going to do when the Big Bug sets everybody except simpleton back to the gas-lamp-and-typhoid days of 1900? More important, what am I going to do? As the last man standing, I presume that I'll have some special privileges, along with a total monopoly on mass communications. At that painful time for humanity, I may even be uniquely suited to be the sort of iron-willed strongman civilization will undoubtedly need to restore order. All I have to do is sit back and wait for the devestation to put me firmly on top! But once I've reached my position of power, what sort of potentate will I be? An engorged plutocrat? A mad king with a pharaonic lust for glory? A foppish lordling waited on by midget footmen? A savage warlord terrorizing my enemies and extracting tribute from my people? Or, this being a new era, will I become some new amalgam of them all? While you're making puny New Year's resolutions about smoking or kindness to animals, consider what it's like to struggle with moral dilemmas on such a scale...

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Judging a book by its cover