At Doomsday-plus-two weeks, Netropolitan has spotted winners and losers beginning to emerge from the messy millennium bug saga. Surprisingly, while many are returning the generators they bought on 30-day approval, the survivalists see themselves as victors鈥攐f sorts. With devastating logic, one survivalist says that everybody should always keep a year of supplies on hand. He claims that the fear of the bug simply motivated him to stockpile what any sensible person should have squirrelled away anyway.
While some doomsters warn that it鈥檚 still too early to sell-off or donate Y2K stockpiles to charity, the hunger relief organisation Second Harvest hopes horders will do the latter. You can find out about the 鈥淵 Go 2 Waste鈥� programme at www.secondharvest.org/aboutash/y2k.html.
Publishers were winners: books on the dreaded date flip were hot sellers. One of the earliest to get in on the action was Ed Yourdon, co-author of the bestseller Time Bomb 2000! In a letter posted on 1 January at www.yourdon.com, the author concedes that the problem may not have been as bad as he expected.
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Big losers, of course, were the bored senseless IT staffers who had to sit watching their monitors, sans champagne, during millennium eve. Catch a heartfelt letter from one such unfortunate, addressed to the bug itself, at www.petsonprozac.com/manifestos/DearY2K.html.
For those who braved their local metropolis only to find that standing in a crowd for hours just wasn鈥檛 much fun, the Miller brewery has a solution. Download its free Beer Pager from www.millerlite.com to help you plan a party. The 鈥減ager鈥� will e-mail invites and then keep a running list of who鈥檚 coming and who鈥檚 not. For your party food, contact a local survivalist鈥攚here we hear you can get the deal of the millennium on party essentials such as giant tins of spam.
