It may not sound like much of a problem, and indeed, it wasn’t seen as such; at least, not until people began to realize just how many computers in every day society relied on date calculations to perform necessary functions.  The book mentions some examples that occurred even before the year 2000, such as the Tiwai Pit incident in South Island, New Zealand, in which an aluminum smelting plant had their production line suddenly and unexpectedly halt in the middle of production when their computer system failed to account for the leap year on New Year’s 1996. It resulted in more than $1 million in damage when several pot cells overheated, and the same exact problem occurred two hours later at another smelting center in Tasmania. Another anecdotal example of how this could be a problem is given in the form of a story about a microchip in a bank vault. It controls when the bank vault can be open and closed, allowing it to be opened during the working week, but keeping it closed on weekends. For security reasons, such chips are buried inside the vault door.  The people who built the chip, the vault, and the bank, never imagined that the chip would need to be removed in the lifetime of the building, so the chip can only be serviced by removing the door.  But on midnight December 31, 2000, the microchip mistakenly rolls back to January 1st, 1900, which wouldn’t be a problem except that that day fell on a Monday while the same date a century later happens on Saturday. As a result the vault remains unlocked during the weekend but refuses to open later in the workweek. So the bank has to be demolished to ensure that people have access to their deposits. Compounding the problem is that many businesses within the same industry all over the world used the same computer systems, and they all faced the prospect of running into such problems at the same time! Even if only a small percentage of banks had to be demolished, if the disruption occurred in all of them at the exact same time, it would turn the cleanup process into quite a logistical problem.  But that is only the tip of the iceberg. Consider that not only does the vault door of the bank not work, but transactions cannot be recorded, credit cards don’t read, bills are credited for ridiculous charges, and computer systems regulating electrical utilities also glitch and cause widespread brownouts, and more…all at the same time!

The book goes into great detail observing how the effect of Year 2000 errors can “ripple” from one aspect of society into others, turning the problem into one of epic proportions. Considering that the extent of Year 2000 problems hadn’t been guessed at until the mid 90’s, there wasn’t much of a window of time in which to fix these errors, and the computer industry has a long history of not making deadlines or budgets. The authors in the book describe the likely outcome of Y2K failures in various areas of society, focusing on things like government, education, food, and work, and then they go on to extrapolate the likely severity of failures and how long they could possibly take to fix, with varying levels of severity calling for a few days to an entire decade.  It is essentially an exercise in risk management; the purpose of the book is to give you a good idea of how to prepare for a possible Y2K related disaster. Having been written in 1997, it does this from the perspective of authors who have no idea what will actually happen, but realize that the situation could be very serious indeed (the possibility of complete social and governmental collapse is even brought up!)