For those concerned enough to worry, we experienced millennium panic. It was as real as most other phobias, i.e., speaking in public, being too fat, or stepping on a crack. It all turned out to be in our mind. It was a high-tech phobia that would never have risen its ugly head if the new millennium had begun in 1965.

Y2K—NO SWEAT

Time is inexorable. Time marches on. Time and tide tarrieth for no man. But time is arbitrary. A clock is the figment of man’s imagination. Like musical notes or justice.

How long shall we make a day? What shall we call this bird-song? What would be a fair sentence? We have concocted something out of thin air, built a whole system around it, and chained ourselves to its capricious rules to the point that the world lay in panic at the coming of some whimsical imaginary date called Y2K.

But who says man can’t roll back the hands of time. Maybe he can’t, but he can dang sure roll back the hands of the clock! He does it every year when he wants to. Daylight saving time, he calls it.

Newfoundland is in a time zone thirty minutes different from Quebec. Madagascar is fifteen minutes from everyone else. The simple fact that you can set your watch ten minutes fast shows that time is no more a real thing in the scope of the universe than the color you paint your house.

So if we were truly concerned about the world coming to a screeching halt the first day of 2000 . . . we could have just changed the numbers. Have a daylight saving century, or better yet, a daylight saving millennium.

We could have gone directly from December 31, 1999, to January 1, 1000. Surely our computers would have been able to distinguish the Modern 1000 with its car payments, bank accounts, Indian treaties, and space shots from the Medieval 1000 with its joustings, burnings at the stake, and virgin sacrifices.

But most important, we would have simply put the problem off. Not unlike the way Congress puts off saving Social Security every year.

But as you can see, the earth has survived our insignificant tempest in a teapot.

To put the Y2K fear in perspective, we should take a lesson from our fellow earth travelers, the animals. What was the impact of the first day of the new millennium on the insect world?

Roger Miller said it best: “Every day is Saturday to a dog.”