Fill the Bath with Water, it's Nearly Y2K Day
by David Millikan
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 63
Autumn 1999

Introduction

David Millikan
David Millikan was the inaugural director of the Zadok Institute. He is currently an author, documentary film maker and Uniting Church minister. E-mail: davemil@nectar.com.au

As this century ends, and the possible crisis in the decimal dating system we have come to know as the "millennium bug" approaches, the local pub and cyberspace are filling with urban myths and computer jargon, conspiracy theories and stories of economic collapse. So, this coming New Year's Eve, should we eat, drink and be merry, or pray¾and then fill the bath with water, just in case.

RECENTLY, I WAS AT the Glengarry Arms Hotel, in Redfern's Abercrombie Street, when the conversation drifted to the millennium bug. Steven, who is a senior executive with a Japanese electronics company, was anxious about what was going to happen to his bank accounts on 1 January 2000. He said that most of his business contemporaries were talking about converting their cash into gold or other tangibles. With what was left in the bank, he said, "On the last trading day of the year, late in the afternoon, I am going to the bank, getting a statement of my accounts and insisting that the manager sign it. When the computers go mad they can't say the money was not there. The banks will be making millions out of this and a lot of people are going to be ripped off."

He nodded gravely and continued: "There are some big movers behind this thing."

Joe the publican entered the conversation and said that a computer friend of his showed him a magazine several weeks earlier. "This was a magazine", Joe recounted, "which none of us would ever get our hands on. It was a sort of newsletter sent around among the real boffins. It was saying that the whole millennium bug thing is bullshit. There isn't going to be any great chaos-well, not like the media are saying. The computer boffins are saying nothing because the more the media beats it up the more money they make. After January 1st, the gravy train stops."

As I listened attentively to what Steven and Joe had said, what I thought was interesting was the conspiratorial seduction of the millennium bug. Steven seemed to be convinced that there were nameless figures behind the whole thing, driving it forward. Joe was sure the whole thing is a money making ruse. Both he and Joe are normally phlegmatic, cynical, characters and yet when it came to the Y2K bug they were seeing connections and hidden forces at work with no shred of evidence except innuendo and rumour.

But logic and the normal demands of evidence dissolve when the sniff of dark intrigue and metaphysical manipulations are in the nostrils. And more than anything I have seen before, the Y2K bug stirs the conspiratorial genie to life.

Perhaps the other reason why the shadow of paranoia and conspiracy hovers over this matter has to do with the opaqueness of the information, the great difficulty there is in discovering what is actually happening. A good friend, whom I normally trust on matters such as this said: "I'm trying to keep two approaches in tension. The first is a conscious avoidance of the whole damn thing. The other is the urge to fill a van up with food, get out the camping gear and head for the bush. I am tending to the first option. But I intend to get in a store of survival food and fill the bath with water."
Needless to say, this advice did not match his normally precise comments on such things.