normal is the new black

[the_siobhan]

An article I was reading this morning referenced the "Y2K bug". I found it enormously amusing that the writer felt the need to explain to his audience what the Y2K bug was because of course it happened so long ago that many people reading would have been too young to understand and remember. I r geezer. Anyway, it was just a throwaway reference, but what I thought was interesting was the way it was framed. I'm paraphrasing, but the writer basically said that companies spent millions of dollars on fixing it, but it ended up being a big waste of money because "everything was fine".

I had to go back and read it again to make sure I understood what he was saying. After all the investment and work of armies of programmers updating code to accomodate a four-digit year, he's claiming that it was all a waste of time and money because - well, because their work was successful?

I'm trying to tease how why this bugs me so much. He doesn't give any reason for why he thinks that the work was unnecessary other than the fact that most systems successfully made the transition. His entire logic seems to be based on, "This is the way things are now so this is the way they would have been anyway, even if we had done nothing."

I'm wondering if that kind of thinking is behind so much of science denialism that I see. When nobody sees kids catching polio, they think "polio isn't something that happens" instead of "we are actively doing something that makes polio not happen ".

I don't know, I'm still chewing on this. What do you think?

Comments

[ramonarjona]

First, this is a general problem in risk mitigation. If nothing happens, then "Why'd we spend all that money?" If something happens, then "Why'd we spend all that money?"

First and half, I tend to prefer "Y2K problem" over "Y2k bug." The problem was entirely by design. (This is where, of course, fights occur between developers and testers. "The behavior is by design." "Fine. It's a design bug. It's still bad.")

Second, as we know, the Y2K problem did not result in everything being fine. There were catastrophes both large and small. I lost a couple person-weeks of work because somebody didn't update the BIOS on our source control server (Do you know what happens when a source repository thinks time has run backward? Neither did I. Do not put a cvs server in the TARDIS.) The Pentagon lost track of some satellites. Two abortions were carried out by mistake. And a bunch of other shit also hit the fan.

When this person and people like him are all like, "Everything was fine" I imagine a legion of COBOL programmers standing in the shadows like Batman, having kept the world safe for a thankless, ignorant populace. And this, I feel, is the role of a technologist: we do stuff, and learn stuff and work on stuff so that the bulk of the human population can cruise along in blissful ignorance of how their microwave works or how easily their ATM can be compromised by an attacker--or in general how close they are to utter, bitter annihilation every gosh darn day but for the efforts of a few people who're working on arcane things that others will never trouble themselves to understand.

[the_siobhan]

Not that you feel strongly about this or anything. :-)

Most people were only affected by a few minor issues - I remember things like stores having to use those old credit-card imprint plates because point-of-sale terminals couldn't handle the dates. But since everybody's credit and accounts were unaffected those little incidents just get forgotten.