In a less-than-sweet bit of confectionary computing, salespeople at Godiva Chocolatier in Water Tower Place last fall couldn’t swipe credit cards that expired in the year 2000 or beyond. A clerk eventually figured out that entering a fake 1999 expiration date by hand allowed the transactions to go through.
“It was a little trick we learned,” said the clerk, who did not want her name used.
Those in the candy store found out the hard way that the Millennium Bug, which many think won’t arrive until Jan. 1, 2000, already has begun to bite.
“We probably are going to see some bumps in the night and inconveniences before Jan. 1,” said Randall von Liski, manager of the state’s Y2K Technology Task Force. “Any time computer systems start encountering those 2000 dates, there could be problems.”
The problem is with dates buried in computer coding. To save space, programmers abbreviated the year from four digits to two–like 1999 to 99–leading to computer confusion when the century changes if the problem isn’t fixed.
A University of Chicago hospital billing system briefly malfunctioned six months ago because it is programmed to automatically project 18 months in advance and could not handle the changeover to 2000. Patients could not be registered in the computer for a day.
“It took us a while to really figure out it was a Year 2000 problem, because we weren’t putting in Year 2000 dates,” said Pat Becker, vice president and chief information officer of the University of Chicago Hospitals and Health System. “It had no major impact; it really was just a nuisance.”
More than a third of companies recently surveyed by the Information Technology Association of America reported having already experienced some kind of Year 2000 problem.
“Frankly, a lot of this stuff has not been made public,” said ITAA President Harris Miller. “Most companies have not released this information because they’re not interested necessarily in telling people they had problems.”
Most of those computer failures, according to the survey conducted in December among 400 member companies in 15 industries, cropped up while users exchanged data, performed accounting calculations, tested software and used databases.
Ranging from troublesome to annoying, these early glitches tend to occur for one of two main reasons.
Scheduling, forecasting and billing systems set to project into the Year 2000 misread the date to be 1900, then either collapse or froth over in nonsense characters.
Or, problems pop up as a result of fixing systems plagued by the Year 2000 bug.
So widespread was the problem among retailers across the country last summer and fall, some banks delayed sending out new credit cards until retailers upgraded their card readers. A few issuing banks simply set all card expiration dates to 1999, requiring that an additional card be sent next year.
“The problem probably was most noticeable in 1997, when there were hardly any cards with those dates and no real merchant awareness of the problem,” said David Africk, senior vice president of business systems for MasterCard. Africk himself had his MasterCard turned down at a gas station and local restaurant because the card swipers had not been upgraded.
The first Monday in January this year, nearly half the 85 employees of David Sterling’s insurance company in Great Neck, N.Y., were locked out when they returned to work from the holiday weekend. A tiny microchip in the brand new security system Sterling installed last fall was unable to handle employee card keys encoded with an expiration date that included 00.
“I didn’t believe all that stuff about Y2K when I read about it, but I experienced it,” Sterling said. “I’m not one of these alarmist people, but I’m going to stock up on some bottled water and maybe a few canned goods.”
More Top Picks Best Steel Toe Work Boots With Toe Guard
Another common danger appears to be the risk that, in scouring thousands or millions of lines of computer programming code to squash the Millennium Bug, the programmer inserts a new error.
Several hundred taxpayers last year, for example, received notices from the Internal Revenue Service that they owed $30 million. John Yost, who heads the IRS’s Year 2000 efforts, acknowledged the notices were an unintended side effect of the agency’s effort to bring its system into Year 2000 compliance.
Von Liski has been warning managers in state and local government about additional dates that may require their attention. Upcoming problem areas on the calendar include:
– Aug. 22. Similar to the Y2K issue, the atomic clocks inside global positioning system satellites will be reset at midnight. Older versions of these systems, which help sailors to navigate, pilots to fly and missiles to reach their targets, require replacement because there are no programming fixes, according to Geoff Chester of the U.S. Naval Observatory.
The clock correction data on older receivers that are not programmed to handle the rollover could either fail completely or be in error up to 13 seconds. Despite the seeming insignificance of 13 seconds, that’s enough to create navigational errors of several miles.
“From what I understand, it’s just going to say toodaloo,” Bill Mills, assistant manager of West Marine on North Avenue, said of the need to replace the systems. His store sold 100 new GPS systems to sailors in December.
“You won’t be able to do anything to fix it; you won’t be positioned anywhere on the planet,” he said. “Then you’ll be doing the old dead reckoning thing. Good thing Lake Michigan is small enough so that if you sail in any direction, you’re bound to hit land eventually–just hold that course!”
– July 1. The state begins fiscal year 2000 on this date. Most state agencies, however, have said they expect their critical systems to be compliant by June, so they maintain it is unlikely computers will mistake the Year 2000 with 1900, because a four-digit date field will replace the two-digit one.
– Sept. 9. Writing computer code is equal parts art and science: Many programmers used 9/9/99 as a default date when one was required to be entered into the software application, or they have used it to signify purge dates or other functions that have nothing to do with dates. That means Sept. 9, 1999, might bring its own host of glitches.
– Oct. 1. The start of the federal fiscal year 2000.