So what’s the big deal about a new year? Not just this one, but any new year? 
  Sure, it’s a good excuse to drink too much and act like an idiot, but those who don’t get tired of that after 40 or 50 years don’t need an excuse anyway. 
  It’s not even the beginning of a new millennium. It’s a year too soon for that, so I guess the fascination with Y2K is really with the string of zeros. Kids get that way when the thousands roll over on odometers in the family cars. Even old kids. 
  If it weren’t for shortsighted programmers back in the ancient age of computing, we wouldn’t even have The Y2K Problem to get excited about. 
  Some people are very excited about what might happen as computers around the world tick off the last second of this old year in their respective time zones and try with their feeble little microprocessors to figure out exactly what the hell that double-zero means. 
  Others couldn’t care less. 
  I tend to be in the latter camp. 
  Some enterprising experts have made a lot of money in the past few years performing witch-doctor rites over corporate computer systems and declaring them “Y2K compliant.” 
  Others have picked up on this and tagged everything they sell as Y2K compliant. Things like hand tools and toilet paper. 
  Others have used fears of shortages and power failures as excuses to buy things they really wanted anyway but couldn’t slip past the family budgetmeister. 
  One man told a Seattle radio host that he was about one scare-story away from acquiring a cozy cabin in the mountains. 
  He said that every time his wife hears about some new Y2K threat, she asks if maybe they should prepare for it, and he agrees. He’d bought a new 4-wheel-drive truck, a new rifle, a generator, and several other toys, all in the name of Y2K preparedness. A vacation cabin was next on his list. 
  As dependent as I am on computers, maybe I should be concerned, but I try not to waste energy worrying about things I can’t or won’t do anything about. 
  The airplanes I fly were built when computers were too big to put in airplanes. I don’t have to worry about air traffic control computers because I’ll be on layover on a Caribbean island New Year’s Day, and if the air traffic computers and radar screens devour their own entrails, well, call me when the system is working again. If the phones don’t work, send me a post card. 
  I did buy a generator a few months ago, but it’s not for Y2K. It’s for camping. 
  A generator in the garage isn’t much use in a power failure anyway unless you’ve installed a switching panel in your house to isolate the circuits you want to power with your generator from the public power grid. Without that isolation panel, all you can do is plug lights and appliances directly into the generator. 
  The Y2K thing with computers is probably either going to be a big deal or no deal at all, I’m guessing. Either way, a bunch of people are going to have a problem. 
  If it’s a big deal, those who made no preparations for it are going to wish they had. 
  If nothing happens, those who stockpiled canned food, bottled water, gasoline, ammunition, and money, may feel a little sheepish, sort of like the True Believers must feel when the world doesn’t end on the day their guru said it would. 
  Grocery and gasoline sales will slump for a couple of weeks while people live off their hoards. 
  Just in case, though, maybe I should copy all the data in this computer to floppy disks, just in case the sky really is falling. Nah, that’s too much work. 
  I’ll just move the date on my computer’s calendar up and watch to see if anything happens when the second hand on the clock hits mid——