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Whether or not you see the street-lamps glowing as you head home from your auld lang syne, you will probably be able to call Aunt Margaret the next morning and wish her a Happy New Millennium. AT&T, for one, says it will have fixed and tested most of its heavily computerized network by the end of this year, and will spend next year making sure its systems work with upgraded gear at other phone companies.
It seems increasingly unlikely you will need to convert your mattress into a safe-deposit box either. Many in the numbers-laden banking and securities industries have been pouring money and manpower into the Y2K problem for two or three years. Their megamergers notwithstanding, Citibank and NationsBank each say they will be done with their internal fixes this year, and are scheduling tests to make sure money can flow through the Federal Reserve. The Securities Industry Association, meanwhile, has scheduled a Year 2000 "dress rehearsal" next month for its members, who handle about 90% of the trading volume in the U.S., with a full-blown readiness test scheduled for March 1999.
O.K., you will have money, but will there be anything to buy? You bet, say manufacturers. "Trucks will be rolling on Jan. 1, 2000," insists Bill James, a vice president at the Grocery Manufacturers of America, which represents large food- and consumer-product makers such as Kellogg and Procter & Gamble. James fully expects some computers to crash, but he points out that there's typically a 15- to 20-day supply of food in the distribution pipeline, which should cover any short-term shortages. "That [extra supply] is not something we're normally proud of," he says, "but it might come in handy."
Paying for your purchases may involve a few misadventures, however. Credit cards with "00" expiration dates are already in circulation from Visa, MasterCard and American Express, and there are reports of unwarranted rejections. But most larger retailers have either updated their card-swiping systems or are in the process of doing so.
Not that there won't be critical problems, especially in the health-care industry. Those medical devices we've come to rely on are made by hundreds of different companies, and less than half of all hospitals have coordinated efforts to check their Year 2000 readiness, according to Joel Ackerman, executive director of the Rx2000 Solutions Institute, a nonprofit group that educates health-care providers on the Y2K bug. Then there are the thousands of far-flung clinics, labs and pharmacies that need to check their equipment. "I do believe there are going to be some unnecessary deaths," says Ackerman.
But even here the anxiety may outstrip reality. Tests suggest that only a small percentage of medical devices could be impacted by the date change, and fewer still will directly affect patient care. Despite some predictions, makers of implanted devices such as pacemakers and defibrillators say these devices will not be affected since they use sensors and not date-based calculations to time the delivery of their electrical impulses.