So here we are, just several days into the new year, and already it's an exhausting one for me. Saturday night I headed to Sacramento, where, along with a Vassar friend who's visiting from D.C., I crashed at my old home in preparation for a Sunday ski trip. Enoch (the D.C. friend), my brother Peter and I planned to wake up before 6 Sunday morning to head to the slopes. We did.

But getting to Kirkwood was half the fun. Normally a two-hour trip (assuming ideal conditions), our Sunday drive (which began just after 7 a.m. in Sacramento) lasted four long hours. A small part of the delay was due to a missed turn along the way, but most of the slow-going trip can be blamed on the ridiculous demands of our very own Cal-Trans: It snowed three inches Saturday night, and even though Highway 88 was perfectly drivable the next morning, the officials required all cars to use snow chains. I'm sure their top concern is my safety, but please, Cal-Trans folks, be a little more realistic when deciding when my safety is in jeopardy. Enoch summed it up best: "Chains? We have people riding MOPEDS straight up snowy mountains in D.C. And they've never even HEARD of chains."

On a final note (I know I've been rather long-winded this week), despite thin cover, the skiing at Kirkwood was tons of fun. Not great skiing, per se, but I loved being back on the slopes.

-Gabe

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To those who believed that the New Year's arrival marked the beginning of a technological Armageddon, the fact that 2000 came smoothly was the result of efficiency and planning. Without that, they say, planes would have fallen from the skies, missiles would have been launched, ATMs would have failed, elevators would have been stuck and wide swaths of the nation would have been plunged into darkness. The fact that this didn't happen, the argument goes, is ample evidence that effective planning avoided the end of civilization as we know it.

Then there are others -- like the CAW staff -- who believe the Y2K "bug" was the product of pure and profound hyperbole, generated and perpetuated by armies of consultants, vendors and others who, while acknowledging the modern dependency on computers, convinced themselves that the bug was the harbinger of a massive meltdown.

The argument is just as fierce -- fiercer, in fact -- than before the New Year dawned.

To whatever extent the Y2K problem existed, and there are many experts who say it did, it is also apparent that the problem was overstated. Spending to correct the "bug" in the United States alone is estimated at between $100 billion and $225 billion, including hundreds of millions of dollars in California alone, and one estimate of the global cost of Y2K compliance has been put at $500 billion. Was all this spending justified?

Reports over the weekend in The New York Times and Washington Post suggested that the problem was overblown by "orders of magnitude," and that the fears about Y2K were driven, at least in part, by a confluence of factors unique to American society.

This nation's reliance on computers, the financial stake of consultants and others in exaggerating Y2K and the fears of agencies, public and private, that if they did nothing they would leave themselves vulnerable to a legion of lawyers lining up to file Y2K-related lawsuits, combined to feed a sort of Y2K hysteria.

The old joke about the man clapping his hands in the desert comes to mind.

"Why are you clapping your hands?" he is asked. "To keep the elephants away," he answers.

"But there aren't any elephants within 5,000 miles of here," he is told.

"See, it works!" he answers.

Similarly, the fact that nothing much happened is proof positive to some that the Y2K preparations worked. And the fact that nothing much happened is proof positive to others that there was never much of a problem to begin with.

Perhaps a meaningful test of the importance of the Y2K problem will occur this week, when thousands of business computing systems will reboot. But it seems likely that the outcome will be similar to that experienced over the New Year, when it became apparent minutes after midnight that little, if anything, was going to happen.

P.T. Barnum once said there was a "sucker born every minute." For those of us who agonized, and emptied our wallets, over Y2K there seems to be evidence once again that the old showman knew what he was talking about.

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