Year 2000 Issues
Newspaper Clippings


-Watch your vacation plans. Six Flags amusement park rides may begin
to act erratically. During testing, after having set the computers
date to January 1, 2000, three computer engineers were trapped upside
down for six hours on "The Screamer" ride before a fourth team
member could arrived to change the date back.

	-Los angles times

-Be prepared to wait in line for a while. McDonalds orders may take
 up to twenty years before being processed. Ironically this actually
 has very little to do with the year 2000.

-Price inflation lookout. A senior representative at Dole Foods inc.
discovered that their pricing calculation software, design to 
estimate the price of their products based on current inflation, 
determined that their line of Sweet-UmmsŪ on the year 2000 will
cost customers 11 million dollars per pack. "In retrospect," 
vice-president Sal Myers said "our software wasn't very good to 
begin with."

-Hold on to your noses. Software loaded onboard every waste
management vehicle will cause them to refuse to run on 
January 1, 2000, which is a Saturday, due to the fact that the computers used 
will think that it's Monday, just as is was in 1900. It could possibly 
take months for the garbage to be picked up in some areas.

-Don't expect to see your family for New Year's Day. At most major
airports which are famous for late flights, the Year 2000 Problem
is yet another thing that will be fixed late this year. According to industry
experts, software designed to keep planes in the air relies heavily on 
knowing the exact date at any giving second. "Frankly we really don't
know what to expect," remarks Ken Wurthheimer of Seattle International
Airport. "We expect to see planes crashing into each other, flights
suddenly exploding on touchdown, and lots of major delays for many
departures. Actually it will be a lot like any other day of the year."
 
-Be careful at the check out counter. The bar code scanner, once praised as
one of the greatest advancements of technology of our time in helping 
check-out clerks discover new ways of slowing down the check out line, will
be on the shakes come January 1, 2000.
Unfortunately, unwitting programers, due mostly to shortsightedness, didn't 
count on the technology still being around for over two decades. The programs 
written that control the amount of laser light emitted by the scanners will 
begin to behave erratically. "You're talking about a technology capable of
putting a hole through a two inch thick piece of steel in less than 1 nanosecond
being used by people, ... who can't even figure out the amount of change their
customers should receive back," comments MIT head laser department
Bill Goers "All I can say is expect to see a lot of casualties and many burnt Pop Tarts 
that day." 

-More danger at the supermarket. You once thought the automatic doors at your
local grocery store was a nice convenience set in by today's booming technology
age. Well, you might not think so on Saturday, January 1, 2000, while on your weekend
shopping trip. According to an industry source, the doors operate only while the 
store is open, which means they are dependent on the date functions within the
processor's chip. At testing done at a major grocery chain's research lab, the clocks 
for the doors computers were set
to midnight, January 1, 2000. The doors appeared to work fine until a software
engineer try to walk through them. "It was horrible. I can't believe what could
have happened, "a software engineer working at the facility said, "The doors
swept closed at a velocity near that of a flying bullet. He was split in two in
less than half a second." The computer glitch was remove from the system later 
that week.