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(Martha Rohrer) wrote: > The sky is not falling, but I have begun to make it a point to ask > every financial and medical source that we deal with if they are > prepared for managing year 2000. This accomplishes two things: > > 1. They are made aware of the problem if this is news to them. And > it tells them their customers have a valid concern. > > 2. I can change our affairs from slaggards to more savvy providers. Good idea, especially #2. We do find some paranoid-sounding utterances and hyperbole, and some of them come from headline and blurb writers. Senator Bob Bennett spoke before the National Press Club on July 17 about the Y2K problem. To retrieve his speech on the www.y2knews.com web page there is the following to click on: "Bennett On Y2K: Warns of Civilization Breakdown." Sounds like he is predicting the breakdown of civilization. But what the Senator actually said was this: "We have tried to be the Paul Revere. But I tell people we're not yet Chicken Little. The British are, indeed, coming. This is a serious problem, and one that cannot be minimized. But I'm not yet ready to say that the sky is falling, as some people do on the web sites. And so we've tried to strike the balance between Paul Revere and Chicken Little. . . . ... "Now, the number-one problem we face is denial. "People say, "No, it can't possibly happen." . . . "I believe we're going to win; that is I think that civilization as we know it is not going to come to an end. It's a possibility. Possibility, if Y2K were this weekend instead of 76 weekends from now, it would. But we have 76 weeks in which to try to get this under control. But we are, in a sense, at war against this problem. And you would not have said in the Second World War, 'Oh, because the president assures us we're going to eventually prevail, we do not need to cover Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, or any of the rest of it.' "And so my plea to you here in the Press Club is: Do not ignore this story just because someone is reassuring you that it's going to work out all right. There are all kinds of stories out there that need to be covered and, most importantly, need to be exposed. . . ." In more general terms, and as Merlin Brown indicated, we can't assume it's being handled by someone else. Phil Tompkins Hoboken NJ 60/9