Helmsman on Call for the Y2K Moment

Think of it: for all those centuries of our human past, we believed that the power to bring mankind to grief and ruin lay in the hands of gods or God, wrathful or dispassionate. Flood and fire and earthquake and drought were the tools of forces or deities, not ourselves. Only since World War I, a tick ago on the cosmic clock, have we held in our own hands the power of our own efficient end. Even when we clench our fists closed, the power trickles out from between our fingers, elusive and deadly as mercury--nuclear bombs in Chechnya, sarin gas in Iraq.

Now a new instrument of our undoing is lying out there like a Malay tiger trap--our own cleverness, the Y2K computer bug, a “bug” the way that influenza and the Black Plague were “bugs.” In short, a killer.

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He wasn’t among the computer’s founding fathers, but certainly he was among the earliest generation of sons, a man who in the 1960s studied at USC on one of the oldest workable models, the IBM 1620--the date of another epochal event, the Plymouth landing.

John Fullenwider kept company with computers as he got older and wiser and they got smaller and quicker--through his years in Army intelligence, when computers tracked the Viet Cong; then back into the private sector, across the country for Rockwell’s war (B-1 bomber) and peace (space shuttle) projects, and finally back to California, a little south from his native Long Beach, to San Diego. Thereafter he spent nine years as that county’s information services director--during the same decade in which the computer world’s trick knee began its telltale aching: Y2K was blowing in.

“I became aware of Y2K subliminally,” recalls Fullenwider, “back in the ‘80s. But back then, it was still so far off you didn’t really have to deal with it. We were always rationalizing that it’d be fixed in the next system, that this payroll system we’re installing today won’t be around by the year 2000.” In truth, we are running computer systems older than our cars, and when or if they crash, the SigAlert will be humongous.

Two years ago, L.A. County hired Fullenwider away from San Diego to be its Y2K czar. He found the first meeting with L.A. county officials “scary, because L.A. hadn’t really begun to deal with the issue. The supervisors weren’t really aware of the magnitude of the problem or its implications.”

They are now. The county had a taste of Y2K when it tried to schedule probations to end in the year 2000 and the computers weren’t buying it. Now all its “mission critical” systems and almost all of its less urgent computers are ready for the witching hour. This puts L.A. County far in front of smaller agencies whose size and distance from the great metropolises lead them to think they are out of harm’s way; yet they are on the grid as surely as if they were in the Pentagon. Fullenwider is regularly implored by treasurers from cities around California to please, please help convince their city councils that this is serious.

From businesses’ standpoint, Y2K is “on the wrong side of the ledger,” and many are correspondingly disinclined to bother with it, offering “all kinds of reasons to rationalize: ‘Let someone else fix it; I won’t be here.’ ”

Y2K “doctors” are already overbooked. Lawyers are already anticipating billions in lawsuits to make amends afterward for what wasn’t fixed before. And, predictably, a cadre of people still believe “it’s the hype of the 20th century, that the only ones getting rich are the consultants.”

No wonder Fullenwider had to do half our interview in L.A. and the rest on the fly in Sacramento, where the state frets about top-to-bottom Y2K consistency, private and government computers, lest one out-of-sync chip take down the rest of the edifice. If small and medium businesses trip over Y2K, they can’t do business, and without business there’s no payroll, and then the layoffs come--and the demand for unemployment and food stamps and the rest.

Scary? A bit. It’s the best of American can-do coupled with utter credence in the same technology riding in like the cavalry in the last reel. Anyone waiting for Bill Gates to come up with a Y2K silver bullet may end up biting one instead.

If there were a Y2K tv channel, Fullenwider would be on it, preaching outreach. “We have to manage the public perception on this. If the populace begins doing things outside the norm, if everybody decides to go get gas the last week of December 1999, there’s not enough gas in the country to do that. If everybody wants to buy two more bags of groceries, there aren’t enough groceries to do that. If everybody says, ‘I’m gonna take $500 out of the ATM, there isn’t enough for everyone to do that. The Fed already is pumping another $50 billion into the economy because of this.”

On the morning after, he says, one of two types of headlines will appear: One will read, “Nation Enters Worst Recession Since 1972. Military Put on Alert as Computer Systems Fail. Murder Suspects Released Because D.O.J. Systems Fail;” the other, “Y2K Bug Squashed. What’s the Big Deal? Professionals Overreacted”--that’s the headline I want to see.”

Come Dec. 31, the Fullenwider family will have to celebrate or cope without him. He’ll be at the county’s emergency operations center that night, “hoping I’m extremely bored.”