true confessions (more or less) of a survivalist

If this is the last thing you ever read that I wrote, blame it on my brother Brian.

I say to blame it on him because we have a 29-year-old policy of passing the buck to each other, and so history and tradition support my decision to make him a scapegoat. Besides, Brian is a computer programmer and therefore, it stands to reason, the responsibility for the end of the world lies entirely on his shoulders.

I'm writing of course, about Y2K, that programming bug in human nature that will cause people to lose control and go into a full-scale panic at midnight New Year's Eve when some smart aleck -- that would be me -- turns off all the lights in the building just to see how people react.

I've always had a morbid fascination with Doomsday scenarios. There's something especially appealing about human civilization ending because of a stupid error like a programming shortcut that considers only the last two digits of the year.

Given the chance of global collapse from an extinction-level meteor hit, a virulent plague or Y2K, I would pick Y2K every day because of the delightful irony in being done in by our own stupidity.

It would be even more appropriate if the problem is fixed -- which it supposedly is -- but the world ends anyway because people overreact to the millennial rollover.

A colleague of mine recently told me about the water and food supplies he had stockpiled in his cellar-turned-bomb shelter, along with enough firepower to hold off an invasion.

"Ooh, can I come by and borrow some bullets if I run out?" I asked him.

My colleague looked straight at me, and deadpanned, "Yes. Stop by any time after New Year's, and I personally will give you an entire clip of bullets. I'll give you all the bullets you can take."

I've decided not to visit him on New Year's after all.

Somebody -- I forget who -- once observed that no society is ever more than 30 years from barbarism. Personally, I think this person was an optimist.

Given the comments I've heard and read from several people who really do think Armageddon is around the corner, I would give civilization 20 minutes before it starts to unravel on New Year's if the power fails for any reason, including a downed electric pole.

If I worked at Public Service Electric and Gas Co., I would have a field day on New Year's Day playing Tic Tac Toe on the power grid with my co-workers.

The real fun with Y2K is going to start when everyone realizes the world still exists. I figure it's going to work like this:

First, the goofballs who actually wanted the world to end either will try to make it end, or, more amusingly, will claim that it actually did end, but the government is covering it up to avoid a panic.

Secondly, experts in the computer industry will give those of us in the media something else to write about by drawing attention to the "Y2038" bug, which will cause all sorts of problems with computers in another 38 years.

(Honest, that's a real problem, though I still don't understand it after having it explained to me three times. Apparently the current thinking is that the problem will have been fixed by the time the Year 2038 arrives. Sound familiar?)

Thirdly, supermarkets and other businesses that have made a killing the last few months selling supplies to worry-prone shoppers are going to see their sales bottom out.

After weeks of record-breaking sales -- I myself spent $160 in two trips to the supermarket this past month, more than twice what I normally would spend -- they're suddenly going to be short on income.

The last bit of fallout will be more personal. After I spent all that money stockpiling food in case there was a run on the supermarket or a disruption in distribution, it dawned on me that I would have no way to cook if the gas goes out.

Hmm. Maybe if you don't see anything else with my byline you should start the investigation with my wife.

y2k

I got a call recently from someone who was distraught by what she has heard about the Y2K computer bug. Like many other people, this person was wondering what the Y2K bug would mean for her personally and what she could do about it.

In case you don’t know what Y2K is, you’re obviously from an Amish community in Pennsylvania or Ohio, and therefore have nothing to worry about, so you can skip the next paragraph.

The Y2K bug stems from a programming shortcut that makes computers look only at the last two digits in the year. On Jan. 1, 2000, so the story goes, computers will think it’s 1900 and the IRS mainframe immediately will begin issuing refunds for all the taxes collected during the last 100 years. Well, maybe not, but I can dream.

The truth is, for all the furor over it the past few years, Y2K has caught absolutely nobody by surprise. My younger brother Ward figured it out when he was 8 because all the deposit slips at Dollar Savings Bank had 19__ for the year, and even he could tell that 2000 wouldn’t fit into that little space, and even if it could, it would say 192000.

So if an 8-year-old who hadn’t even seen a computer could figure it out, why couldn’t all the computer programmers figure a way around it? Actually, they did, but they decided they could make more money by waiting 20 years for people to start panicking and then rolling out the Y2K-compliant merchandise at inflated prices.

A few self-labeled computer experts have predicted the computer problems will result in incredible disaster worldwide, from airplanes crashing and fax machines not working right to the entire eastern seaboard sinking beneath the waves of the Atlantic Ocean.

As a result, a lot of people have been buying property in Ohio for the real-estate appreciation when it becomes beachfront property, once they have made sure the land isn’t under any major airplane routes.

Other impressionable people have equated Y2K with the End of the World, especially because -- as everyone knows -- round numbers make God very angry, so he goes around smiting people with greater frequency than normal.

Some people, like doomsday prophet Gary North, have even offered to help God with the smiting business, and have drawn up lists of people to smite. (We can be sure newspaper editors are high on that list.)

Otherwise normal people have been buying houses in the woods and stockpiling ammunition and toilet paper. My advice for the rest of us is, if you have a house in the woods, sell it immediately and buy property in Ohio.

With your leftover money, invest heavily in the firearms and toilet-paper industries, and remember to buy some 24-packs of Charmin yourself. There will be no toilet paper production after civilization collapses in January, so those two-ply sheets will be worth their weight in gold.

My Uncle Dave Coates recently declared that the bulk of the Y2K craze is media-driven. Are you kidding me? Of course it is. This is the best thing that’s happened to newspapers since Watergate.

Which story would you rather read: "New Jersey will perish in flames on Jan. 1" or "Bob Oaks considers run for school board?" I would too, but unfortunately Bob missed the filing deadline to run this year.

So we’ve been milking Y2K for all we can. So far, I’ve been able to get a three-part series, a couple letters, two cartoons and a column out of it in just this newspaper.

My big problem next January won’t be how to live in a house without running water or electricity, it’s going to be what to write about.