Just a small disaster was all they wanted. A few hundred people incinerated in a fiery plane crash. Traffic gridlock in a few urban areas, maybe with a few road rage shootings thrown in. Maybe ten thousand people or so going hungry for a couple of days.

Instead, the 1/1/2000 changeover occurred with nary a whimper — until the inevitable complaining started. Now, the Great Myth of Y2K Doomsday has been rapidly replaced with Y2Kvetching. Nothing went wrong, so maybe we really didn’t need to spend those billions of dollars, after all?

The switch could have been easily predicted — and to the best of my knowledge, wasn’t — by anybody who understands the basic difference between computer programmers and your standard, run-of-the-mill human being. Computer programmers attempt to make their software mathematically elegant; software that merely works is frequently laudable — in parlance, a good “hack” — but it’s not quite as good as software that is logically bulletproof. In the real world, nothing is ever that good, so the average person doesn’t know what the hell we’re talking about.

In my neighborhood in Washington, DC, there are five different bus routes that run up and down Wisconsin Avenue; they all begin in the same spot, but they diverge in Georgetown and continue on to different destinations. In real-world terms, this works just fine. To a computer programmer, this is a pretty kludgy system. (A kludge is a system that works, usually because it’s overly complicated, or as in the Y2K scenario, based upon a limited set of inputs.) Most techies, if we were programming the bus system, would just put one big bus on Wisconsin Avenue, then run different bus lines from the endpoints.

Y2K, in a nutshell, was a bunch of computer analysts looking at a kludgy system as saying, “you know, this just isn’t bulletproof, and we don’t know where the problems might be.” And since there’s not a damn thing that isn’t computer-reliant somewhere, the worst-case scenarios were easy to envision.

So — was all of this blown way out of proportion? The obvious answer is no, but some people would have you believe that everything went so smoothly that the whole thing was a scam cooked up by those of us who would profit by it. Logically, then, these people wanted to see a few disasters, just to prove that all of that money was spent to good purpose. As Germany, Italy, and China seem to have come through unscathed, these people now have their Schadenfreude dressed up with no place to go.

The reality, of course, is different. I guarantee you that some people, somewhere, have had a very bad week, as they tripped up on Y2K issues that they didn’t find in time; more companies and governments will find their own bugs in the next twelve months. They’ll all bend over backwards to prevent anyone from finding out it’s Y2K-related, though — as the first new paradigm of 2000 is that anyone who has a Y2K mosquito bite is a grade-A moron.