Sometimes I think we do our jobs too well.

The Year 2000 was supposed to be the first time that the entire world figured out just how reliant we were on computers, as all of them were alleged to be ticking time bombs. The fear mongering was intense. I remember a coworker of mine expressing her fears about the date. The conversation went a little like this:

Coworker: This is going to be the end of life on earth as we know it.
Me: Umm…. I don’t really think so.
Coworker: Jesus, Jim, you really don’t understand. All those missile silos in Russia? Yeah, they’re all controlled by computers with millions of numbers being crunched. But when they generate random numbers, they’re using the wrong date. That could trigger a nuclear bomb to launch.
Me: (confused) No… Sweetheart, you can’t have a wrong random number.
Coworker: You idiot! This is serious.
Me: I know. Do you really think that there’s code somewhere that says “If random number = 3 then blow up America”?

There was little understanding of what the Y2K thing was going to be. Really, what we were looking at was the potential for computers to get the date wrong and think it was 1972. Aside from suggesting disco fashion accessories, all we really had to worry about was calculations where dates were sensitive.

And we caught them. The whole episode ended not with a huge explosion or with the fiery hand of God. It came and went with only a handful of legitimate and/or embarrassing incidents the world over. This is because computer programmers did their job and fixed the errors.

But the majority of the people in the wild world remember only the panic they felt and the total anticlimax of the thing. To many, that means there never WAS a problem. So some guy winds up with a video store rental bill asking for billions of dollars. We know they’re not going to ACCEPT that his two day overdue charge cost that much. When you think about it like that, it’s kind of a sad joke. Then we get bitter because we think of all the money that got spent on thousands upon thousands of computer nerds fixing billions of lines of COBOL code, and it just feels like a scam.

The first wave of the 2009 H1N1 Swine Flu pandemic has passed. It too did not trigger the kinds of deaths we associate in our heads with 1918. And we’re looking at it the same way. Most people don’t know the facts at all about how this flu can impact us, especially those of us who are not typically at risk from traditional strains of the flu. We don’t by and large understand that there are reasons that the legitimate scientists are calling a second and more brutal wave of the flu entirely likely (though by no means guaranteed).

Ignorance isn’t bliss, it so often turns to disdain. Disdain like the way they felt when computers didn’t take over the world, and disdain like they feel when someone says that they should get a flu vaccination. After all, nobody’s sick with the stupid H1N1. It’s now the punchline to all sorts of jokes. It’s nothing more than just the radical overreaction of a bunch of effete scientist nerds who live in the pocket of the pharmaceutical giants. They want us scared so they can make a mint selling vaccines.

This is patently ridiculous. And exactly the same public reaction to the Y2K bug. One of the solutions that was adopted from Y2K was to see any two digit year below 35 as 2oxx, and any year greater than or equal to 35 to be 19xx. This is a short term band aid to the situation, meaning that all of those lines of code will need to be replaced prior to 2035. Of course, with the speed of information technology it is considered a viable option to assume that at some point the system will be fixed in the meantime, but this is the same thinking that resulted in the problem in the first place. Two digit years were cheaper to store than 4 digit years, and they’re bloody always 19xx, right?

The similarities to the reaction to Y2K and Swine Flu are to me eerily similar. The difference is that the disdain that IT professionals have had to endure since Y2K is unimportant. Nerds are used to being hated by the masses, and we know deep down that what we did was worthwhile. Ignorance around this pandemic could well prove fatal.

Jim