One winter season (I think it was '93), we decided to give away a bunch of winter and holiday-themed icons (about 30 of them) by posting them on CompuServe (there wasn't really much of a Web back then). You'd download these things and you could pretty-up your desktop with them. We called this free gift, as I was reminded today, "Winter Fun".

So today I get a call from a very serious woman representing a large organization whose apparent Y2K preparation process was to have someone call and demand written Y2K compliance statements from all their software suppliers. So this woman called and demanded we write a detailed document describing our compliance strategy for "Winter Fun". I couldn't resist. "Winter Fun is not Y2K compliant, therefore there will be no winter", I told her. I played with her a bit more, in varying counter-productive, karma-burning, yes-I-have-a-houseboat-on-the-lake-of-fire sorts of ways.

But as I thought about it later, I became more and more appalled.

How could anyone in their right mind have allowed "Winter Fun" to show up on a list of Y2K compliance issues? Wouldn't time be better spent on "guaranteed power" or "Darned right there'll be fresh food," or "Yes, we'll be able to print paychecks," or any of the other more pressing requirements?

Brains are necessary here, people. Y2K can be overcome and we'll live nicely through it if we're just not stupid. I'll be honest, I was pretty confident that Y2K would be a mere blip until I got this call. But if people are this stupid four months before the zero hour, maybe I better stockpile some SpaghettiOs.

So tonight, I decided to get on my soapbox. Hundreds of thousands of people read our publications. Maybe if we all started a "let's not be friggin' stupid" campaign, Y2K would work out fine. You're all pretty influential folks. Don't ignore your companies' Y2K efforts. Check into them. Make sure they're spending time making critical systems work and not screwing around with "Winter Fun". It really pisses me off that to many companies, Y2K preparation means having a bunch of temps collect compliance statements. Let's try not to put the fate of the world into the hands of a bunch of poorly-trained temps reading off a script.

OK? Good. Go do it. Now, please...

Thank you!

For more than 20 years, David Gewirtz, the author of Where Have All The Emails Gone? and The Flexible Enterprise, has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com and you can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/DavidGewirtz.