Nobody actually knows what the full impact of the bug will be. Some people think there will be a huge crash, but it is more likely to be a fairly minor thing with some systems going down for a couple of days.
Personally I think there's been a bit too much hype about it, though I don't think I'll be flying anywhere for a while! Some airlines are not letting people fly places where they don't feel confident that their systems are Y2K compliant. Some cars could also be affected. My advice would be: have the New Year's Eve party at home!
A lot of our clients are big financial institutions. We investigate their computer systems to check how they will be affected by the date 2000. So we look at all the programmes and check for Y2K compliance. If the time-lock system of a bank was affected for instance, on January 1st, 2000, the computer will think it is 1900.
So when Monday the 3rd comes around, the computer will think is Saturday and won't open up to customers. Everyone would just have to go to the bank at the weekend until the problem was corrected! So, when a client comes to us, we check which of the programmes they use actually employ dates. We go through those and check which are safe enough.
We also have to investigate how programmes with dates will interact with those which have no dates. When we identify the unsafe programmes, we are each assigned a few and we have to figure out how to fix them. When you've put those fixes in, you have to test them, which takes a long time.
You have to put in loads of dates and other circumstances that could make the software fall over. It is partly a very mathematical procedure, partly speculation.
I've always been into computers - in fact I've always been big into science fiction and computers are a big part of all that. When I was at school I knew they'd become an integral part of people's lives and that it was an area I wanted to work in. When I left school, I was working on an assembly line with a production company which made printer parts. I got bored after the first five minutes, but I stuck it out for two years. After a year I started studying for a diploma in information systems at Trinity; they taught us Cobol there, the language which is specifically affected by the bug. Nowadays everyone is learning Cobol again because there is so much work making systems worldwide Y2K compliant, but before that pressure came about people had stopped learning Cobol. Because I knew Cobol, I got the job here after my first year at Trinity. I'm still studying part time, which is a killer.
The most boring part of the job is the start, when you have to go through thousands of lines of code and figure out what will be safe. It all has to be checked and double-checked. It is hard to keep concentrating - you could spend a whole day at it, just on and on scrolling through. It becomes very hypnotic and it's easy to tune out and miss something. Another day you might come in to solve the problems, which is my favourite part. After investigating a programme you'd have a good idea of what has to be done. A lot of changes are standard; the most complicated is sorting out a database, and having to change dates which will affect other programmes. Seeing a problem solved gives you great satisfaction. Some people believe the Y2K bug is part of a big conspiracy. They believe it was deliberately created in the 1960s by programmers who were looking forward 30 years to being brought out of retirement and paid a fortune to solve the problem - which has, in fact, happened! I'm not so sure it was done on purpose, though. I reckon they were just incompetent.
In an interview with Jackie Bourke
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