h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

One of the interesting side effects of 'The Millennium Bug', is the amount of people seem to have forgotten how to spell 'Millennium'.

I heard a story not long ago of a women in Hong Kong who bought some pills to cure 'The Millennium Bug' as she was told it was some sort of flu. Apparently, she paid thousands for this.

A couple of years ago, I decided to make it my mission to inform businesses in the Highlands of Scotland about the potential effects of this 'Bug', and one client replied ' I should be OK, I've got Anti-Virus checking software pre-installed on my computers'.

I've lost count of the amount of clients who replied 'Oh, that's not until the year 2000, we'll look into it closer to the date', they STILL haven't even approached the problem, on the basis that 'it should only take a couple of hours to deal with'.

Personally, I'm now of the opinion that it will probably turn out to be a bit of a 'damp squib', but nevertheless it could turn out to be a very interesting period.

What amazes me even more is some of the astronomical bonuses being given to staff to work over the period.

Large bonuses? not if you work in the NHS. We are such lovely dedicated people and anyway, money brings us out in a nasty rash.

In the pre-millennium days, many were asking me about my concerns over it because I love messing about with computers and the web; I wasn't concerned for my own machine because it's a Mac and only PC users need to panic....or those with the ancient mainframes that date back twenty years or more. The worst that could happen to my computer is a power-failure, and I doubted that that would happen.

Now that all the frothing is over with, how many are upgrading their systems to keep pace with the changes in technology? I know people that are still using Windows 3.11; I'm a happy Mac 8.6er (for the time being, anyway)....

Fruitbat