It was the perfect fable for our time: HAL recast as a billion tiny bugs, his omnipotent malevolence replaced by our own innocent oversight. Technology had become so all-encompassing and incomprehensible, the fable began, that we had unwittingly lost control of it. So the smallest thing, our human habit of hiply referring to years by the last two digits, was going to topple this electronic pack of cards, sending planes crashing to the ground, nukes leaping from their silos, electricity to a standstill and all of humanity back to a time much earlier than the 1900 our computers would believe it was. It was a cleansing fantasy, a dream of ridding ourselves of the increasingly unavoidable yoke of overcivilization and going back to a society simple enough for us to understand.
So at 4:30 a.m. on Dec. 31, in Lisbon, Ohio, fable believers Bruce and Diane Eckhart awoke and immersed themselves in technology for what they believed was the last time, turning on their two televisions, dialing up the Internet and clicking on their shortwave radio to monitor the first Y2K rollover in Kiribati. Since 1997 the Eckharts have been stockpiling food, conducting surprise drills, practicing firearm skills, converting savings into gold coins and studying rudimentary dentistry and field medicine. "So far, it's just a minor power outage in New Zealand," Diane reports, before uttering a sentence few have ever delivered. "But we've heard nothing about Guam; it's kind of disturbing."
As the day wears on, and news reports show that not even China is having problems, their daughter Danielle, 12, is the first to lose interest. "Whatever happens, happens," she says, after singing along to a Sheryl Crow tape. "We won't have to go grocery shopping for a while." And while Bruce, 45, is still talking about being wary of strangers from neighboring Youngstown coming to loot his stash, his wife Diane, 42, is already contemplating their massive store of canned food. "I'm going to save on groceries," she says, determined to eat their 12 cans of Spam, disaster or not. "I can't decide if I'm going to buy a Jacuzzi or a new computer with the money."
In Tennessee, Karen Anderson woke up on New Year's Day less ready than the Eckharts to dig in to her canned food. The self-designated Martha Stewart of Y2K (her book Y2K for Women: How to Protect Your Home and Family in the Coming Crisis as well as her website, y2kwomen.com give tips on reusable tampons) now fears a leap year computer bug on Feb. 29, among other potential disasters. "We don't know what's going to happen with the economy. If the markets crash or my husband loses his job, we're ready," she says. In Ontario, Bruce Beach, who began constructing a bunker of 42 buried school buses 18 years ago, watched astounded as city after city passed into modernity with nary a scratch. And MTV Online, as if to mock it all, was showing Internet film of the six kids it set up in a campy Y2K bunker under a building in Manhattan.