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Scared yet?
Sep. 2nd, 2010 10:13 amBack in 1999, I'd just started a new job and it was a good one. Not only was I getting paid twice what I'd got in my old job, but for the first time in my career I had an internet linked comuter on my desk and my own office with a door that shut. Needless to say, I used this combination to spend hours every day looking at picture of ladies in their underwear work hard to increase shareholder value*.
A few weeks into the job we had a computer consultant come in to prepare us for the Y2K bug. I don't know if many people even remember Y2K these days, but it was quite a big deal at the time. Basically, as I recall it was alleged that as computers couldn't count beyond 1999, as the year 2000 ticked over on their internal clocks a giant space insect would knock the earth out of orbit and into the sun. Needless to say this worried a lot of people and huge, huge sums of money were spent combatting it. As an example, so desperate were companies for decent IT staff to cover their backs that in 1999, the UK edition of Computing magazine was taking over £500,000 in recruitment advertising revenue every week, and that was just a drop in the ocean. Globally, hundreds of millions - billions - were spent.
Anyway, the computer consultant spent a few days in our office generally acting like a plumber dealing with people who don't know how their boiler works. He drank lots of cups of tea, made that whistling noise between his teeth to show there's a real problem, and charged by the hour. I got chatting to him once and asked him how much he was getting paid, and he refused to tell me but he did say that it was only a four-figure sum as he knew the MD. "I'm doing this work for him cheap", he said. "He's a mate".
At the end of all this, the Y2K bug was a damp squib. Global computing didn't seize up and the earth didn't topple out of orbit. All that happened was the IT Consulting industry enjoyed an absolute bonanza.
I was thinking the other day about how these crises appear, get vast sums spent on them, and then just seem to fizzle out. After Y2K there was SARS, which the World Health Organisation predicted would kill a hundred and fifty million people. What actually happened was that it killed 779 people and Flu vaccine manufacturers made out like bandits. After Sars we had Swine Flu, which the WHO said would kill a hundred and fifty million people (there's that number again) unless we gave GlaxoSmithKline a huge pile of gold. Fortunately GSK got their huge pile of gold and disaster was averted.
Remember Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis? Back in the 1980's anyone who'd ever eaten beef was going to be dead by now with our brains all mushy. As it turned out Twitter turned our brains to mush but we're still alive. Salmonella in eggs? Nobody died, there was never any actual evidence presented that eggs contained Salmonella, but 5 million chickens in the UK were killed in a windfall for the chicken-killing industry. Foot and Mouth? A minor outbreak became a scare, hundreds of thousands of perfectly healthy animals were killed and burned, and abbatoir owners all bought rather nice new cars.
The cynic in me might go so far as to suggest that scares are a great way of stimulating economic activity and getting money moving around. The War on Terror, for example, which largely comprised of us Westerners killing many thousands and completing the military subjugation of two nations in a little under a fortnight and the Terrorists response, which was to effectively make Londoners late for work one morning and then make a Glaswegian cross enough to get stuck into man who was on fire. But by crikey, fear doesn't half sell, doesn't it? Remember Anthrax through the post? Websites selling anthrax masks and testing kits sprang up within minutes and fast bucks were made.
But let us leave such cynicism aside for a moment. You see, I'm not sure if you've heard but the icecaps are melting and our civilisation is going to collapse and we're all going to drown. Fortunately I've got some lifeboats for sale!
I'll do them for you cheap. You're a mate.
*Actually, my abiding memory of working in the year 2000 is spending for too much time nattering to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
godzuki and kikayume over email.
A few weeks into the job we had a computer consultant come in to prepare us for the Y2K bug. I don't know if many people even remember Y2K these days, but it was quite a big deal at the time. Basically, as I recall it was alleged that as computers couldn't count beyond 1999, as the year 2000 ticked over on their internal clocks a giant space insect would knock the earth out of orbit and into the sun. Needless to say this worried a lot of people and huge, huge sums of money were spent combatting it. As an example, so desperate were companies for decent IT staff to cover their backs that in 1999, the UK edition of Computing magazine was taking over £500,000 in recruitment advertising revenue every week, and that was just a drop in the ocean. Globally, hundreds of millions - billions - were spent.
Anyway, the computer consultant spent a few days in our office generally acting like a plumber dealing with people who don't know how their boiler works. He drank lots of cups of tea, made that whistling noise between his teeth to show there's a real problem, and charged by the hour. I got chatting to him once and asked him how much he was getting paid, and he refused to tell me but he did say that it was only a four-figure sum as he knew the MD. "I'm doing this work for him cheap", he said. "He's a mate".
At the end of all this, the Y2K bug was a damp squib. Global computing didn't seize up and the earth didn't topple out of orbit. All that happened was the IT Consulting industry enjoyed an absolute bonanza.
I was thinking the other day about how these crises appear, get vast sums spent on them, and then just seem to fizzle out. After Y2K there was SARS, which the World Health Organisation predicted would kill a hundred and fifty million people. What actually happened was that it killed 779 people and Flu vaccine manufacturers made out like bandits. After Sars we had Swine Flu, which the WHO said would kill a hundred and fifty million people (there's that number again) unless we gave GlaxoSmithKline a huge pile of gold. Fortunately GSK got their huge pile of gold and disaster was averted.
Remember Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis? Back in the 1980's anyone who'd ever eaten beef was going to be dead by now with our brains all mushy. As it turned out Twitter turned our brains to mush but we're still alive. Salmonella in eggs? Nobody died, there was never any actual evidence presented that eggs contained Salmonella, but 5 million chickens in the UK were killed in a windfall for the chicken-killing industry. Foot and Mouth? A minor outbreak became a scare, hundreds of thousands of perfectly healthy animals were killed and burned, and abbatoir owners all bought rather nice new cars.
The cynic in me might go so far as to suggest that scares are a great way of stimulating economic activity and getting money moving around. The War on Terror, for example, which largely comprised of us Westerners killing many thousands and completing the military subjugation of two nations in a little under a fortnight and the Terrorists response, which was to effectively make Londoners late for work one morning and then make a Glaswegian cross enough to get stuck into man who was on fire. But by crikey, fear doesn't half sell, doesn't it? Remember Anthrax through the post? Websites selling anthrax masks and testing kits sprang up within minutes and fast bucks were made.
But let us leave such cynicism aside for a moment. You see, I'm not sure if you've heard but the icecaps are melting and our civilisation is going to collapse and we're all going to drown. Fortunately I've got some lifeboats for sale!
I'll do them for you cheap. You're a mate.
*Actually, my abiding memory of working in the year 2000 is spending for too much time nattering to
godzuki and kikayume over email.
