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Pointing the finger at the guilty party - especially after guilt has been determined - and really slamming the guilty party has always been a favorite pastime of mine, I admit. When I’m wrong, I admit it. In this case, however, I have even gone out of my way to notify several offending parties of their guilt, so in writing this column, I feel no mercy in the proverbial finger-pointing.
As we entered the New Year, the “Year 2000,” or “Y2K,” no one knew - at least not with 100 percent certainty about which pieces of critical equipment were going to work. Perhaps at that point the question was, “What isn’t going to work?”
A friend of mine who works for one of the highly technical and computerized departments dealing with the Y2K issue at the University of Pennsylvania was called to work the final hours of 1999 and the first few hours of 2000. She, along with many others at the university that night were waiting and watching for any birth pangs of the millennial bug to appear. My friend said she planned on a short test period prior to the midnight hour. Once the chime struck twelve, however, she had another two hours or so of testing to perform. The second test phase of the night would prove to be the climax of a fair part of her work during the past two years. The culmination of her efforts, as well as those of her cohorts at the university Ben Franklin founded, with the exception of some minor tweaks, found their efforts fruitful.
This same testing, worrying, and last minute fretting was repeated at companies, government offices, and businesses around the world that night. Millions, if not billions of dollars of hardware and software upgrades over the past several years made the change in year less of a mess and little more than a worry, though careful planning and readiness planning was needed in case something did go amuck in the system.
Now to the juicy part of this week’s column. Sinking my teeth into the victim. In this case, the victim is television news.
As I sat watching the NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw just days before Y2K, I listened time and again to Brokaw speak falsehoods. He helped propagate additional fears of Y2K compliance that had been alleviated over one year before. He also made reference for viewers to plan on watching shows that were, at that point, still to be aired on the network that week, making mention to “the new millennium” and “the new century.”
The role of the media is to educate and inform the citizens of this country. Not to incite excitement over things which may or may not happen, especially when the issue had been dealt with in the past year.
Brokaw, via NBC’s broadcast, helped propagate fears that people could actually have caused failure of telephone service this past January 1 at midnight. His theory is on that was squelched more than a year ago by checks with many local telephone companies across the country. According to Brokaw, there was concern among telephone company officials that Americans would all lift their telephone handsets at the stroke of midnight to check for a dial tone. If millions of people in each area did that, Brokaw said, the infrastructure at the local telephone companies could possibly flood itself and crash.
In reality, however, telephone company officials already addressed that issue and their concerns, but not how Brokaw described. They indicated that in a city of two million, for example, if 1.5 million people lifted the handsets on their phones at midnight, perhaps only 50 to 75 percent of the people would actually hear a dial tone. The telephone company officials worried that the people who did not hear the dial tone would get the wrong impression and panic.
Wait a second here! I pick up my phone. There’s no dial tone. The bill is paid, though. And someone wants me to understand there is no reason to worry, despite the fact that it’s now 12:01 a.m. January 1, 2000?
The telephone company officials last year explained over a year ago, and had NBC News done its fact checking, they would have found that concern was due to the limited number of connections that can be made from any given exchange. Although there may be two million customers in one city, there are not enough connections for two million simultaneous calls to be made at any given second. So, as soon as the first 500,000 people hung up their phones, satisfied they have phone service, the next 500,000 people would then hear the dial tone as well. Amazing, isn’t it?
Now to the heart of this week’s blast.
What’s all this about “the new century” and the “new millennium” that Brokaw hawked about? Does NBC News or Brokaw bother checking any information before it’s aired?
Let’s take a brief tour of history and calendar making. When the Julian calendar was first created, it was started in the year one, not zero. Along that line, the first century would have ended January 1, 101, not 100. The first millennium would have come to a close on January 1, 1001, not January 1, 1000. Now consider what that means for us as we come to shutting down the last century of the second millennium. In plain language, it means the new millennium, the new century, if you will, actually begins next year, January 1, 2001.
Does that mean we have to go through all the “end of the century” and all the “end of the millennium” sales that we had to deal with on TV, radio? I hope
not!
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"Millennium
Eve Arrives Amid Errors"
