Pushbutton technology can prove expensive

Traffic jams have replaced house prices as the conversational gambit around the lunch tables lately. People have grown tired of talking about the ridiculous price of the house two doors down, or the fact that £500,000 properties are becoming the norm, and have switched to road rage instead. Whereas once the boasts were of how quickly you could get to work (door to door in 10 minutes - even quicker if you cut through the housing estate and sneaked out through a laneway) now points are scored for how long it takes to get onto the main road from wherever your £500,000 house happens to be.

I know the aim of the Quality Bus Corridor from Malahide is to keep the buses running on time and force us onto public transport even though the various transport authorities have told us it would be a crisis if everyone left their cars behind. This week on the 15minute trip to work (well, there have to be some compensations for starting early) I didn't see a single bus in the QBC. As regular readers will know, I have cycled, walked and taken the bus to work over the past year, but it's very hard to do any of those things on a dank November morning. The DART isn't a viable option for me, even when there isn't a strike.

Anyway, we have our own traffic crisis in the IFSC at the moment, courtesy of the Citibank building which continues to cause chaos in Commons Street. This is partly because of the mobile traffic lights that have been installed on the street in order to filter traffic around the construction site. Obviously whoever programmes the mobile traffic lights just sticks them on green for five minutes and red for five minutes regardless of the flow of traffic. Last week, I sat in a queue of cars which stretched from Commons Street almost as far as Amiens Street as we waited for the lights to go green. I spent longer in the queue for the carpark than I did driving from the house.

Yet all the building work has given a great lease of life to the docks on both sides of the river. It's a while since I had to drive down the southside of the docks but I did last Tuesday night and the IFSC looked fantastic from the opposite side of the river. The buildings were lit up, the lights along the quays were reflecting in the water - it really did look wonderful. The lighting was also helped by the steady stream of cars crawling along at about two miles an hour, but you can't have everything.

I've been watching a few TV programmes about virtual offices lately, as I can't help thinking that we're all going to have to work from home soon since it'll be impossible to get to the office before midday. I can't make my mind up about it. One of the recent programmes I watched showed a real-life office where there were a few desks which people could use whenever they felt like coming in. But most of the time they didn't have to. Since a lot of dealing is done either by screen or by phone, it's a profession that seems to lend itself to working from home. Although I'm not sure that you'd exactly get the flavour of the credit crunch by staggering down to your computer in your pyjamas. Maybe that's not such a bad thing.

Anyway, the whole computer dealing thing got a little out of hand last week when a trainee dealer accidentally managed to deal in a large number of bund futures. The cost of the training exercise has been put at about £11 million as the hapless trainee had pressed the wrong button. It's one of those gems of the market that you learn by your mistakes and the first loss teaches you a lot, but at £11 million a pop you'd want to learn how to run a profitable hedge fund through a Russian debt crisis. What will happen to the training programmes when the millennium bug hits.

Actually if there's one thing that bores me to tears (after the euro which is so boring as to be an almost patent remedy for insomnia at this stage) it's the millennium bug. It's obviously not boring for all the IT people who are getting booming-economy type salaries for sorting out the mess, but I'm sick to the teeth of hearing about the fact that every piece of technological equipment on earth is going to break down on the day. At this point I'm past caring - if it's something in an office then surely there's been ample time to sort out the problem by now. If it's the video machine at home then I've never been able to programme it properly anyway, so who cares? The only thing I'm slightly worried about is the cash dispensing machine at the bank. Given the bank's profits this year, one hopes that they've made adequate provision for dishing out the loot on January 1st, 2000, since I reckon we'll all need it given that every known form of entertainment will quadruple in price on December 31st 1999.

I'm wondering what the flavour of the month will be as far as trading goes for the end of the century. Internet stocks are the current fad even though lots of Net companies haven't made any money yet. The only one that I watch with any interest (although I don't own any shares in the company) is Amazon, the online bookstore. And that's because I obviously have a proprietorial interest in any bookstore given my forays into print. Amazon's shares have gone from about $50 to $350 (£34£238) this year despite it's lack of profitability. Mind you it's asking a lot to buy shares in a company which keeps on losing money.

I suppose the millennium bug holds no fears for Internet firms. One presumes that there are hundred of techie people making sure that their equipment is year 2000 compliant. I'll bet, though, that there's a dealer out there ready to hit the wrong button when he or she wanders into work on January 4th, 2000. I suppose if it's only £11 million that gets lost on the day, everyone will think they've got off lightly.

Sheila O'Flanagan is a fixed-income specialist at NCB Stockbrokers