The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Needless to say it’s been a quarter of a century since the Y-2K scare, that nightmare scenario predicting a global electronic shutdown because the engineers never anticipated their programs would last past the new millenia. I had friends, engineers all, who knew their coding hadn’t factored in the switch from 1999 to 2000. Planes would fall from the sky, power grids would fail, chaos and darkness would ensue. They stored food and water, installed wood burning stoves, bought supplies and weapons because they knew anarchy would descend on civilization at the stroke of midnight, New Year’s Eve, Dec. 31st, 1999.

One friend, Marvin, a wealthy Microsoft man, bought some large acreage up the road, dug a well and installed a hand pump, used a bulldozer to scrape an acre for his subsistence garden and brought in dump trucks of topsoil, purchased chickens and goats and a milk cow, then he erected a 10 foot fence to keep marauding panicked neighbors and refugees from the soon-to-be dystopian city of Stanwoodopolis out. It so happened that he was at our New Year’s Bash that year with about 50 or so of us clueless peasants partying away while Armageddon hurtled toward us.

Why Marvin wasn’t home in his bunker was beyond me. Maybe at the End of the World the victims need companionship, compassion and some human touch. Even engineers. As midnight inexorably bore down on us, I noticed Marvin checking the clock and growing more and more anxious. Probably all the software engineers around the globe were doing the same thing. I mean, how would you feel knowing you’d set the gears in motion that would destroy civilization as you know it, returning us to barbarism, disease and starvation?

Just before the stroke of midnight I slipped downstairs to the fuse box in the basement and listened to our revelers counting off the final seconds in unison. Ten, nine, eight, seven …. three, two, one and … then I pulled the breaker bar. Exactly as Marvin and his engineer pals had feared, the power grid collapsed!!! Unfortunately I missed the ensuing panic upstairs, the culmination of even the doubters’ worst fears. And certainly Marvin’s.

I don’t really remember how long I let the mob huddle in darkness with their nightmare scenarios. Not too long — after all, I’m not a monster. And no, maybe it wasn’t the way to ring in the New Year and the Next Millenium, but I suspect, if nothing else, folks were suddenly sober enough to drive home in cars that mercifully still worked and to homes that were still sanctuary. Except maybe Marve, who would shortly thereafter sell his plantation of paranoia and return to his apartment in the city, no doubt disappointed his dreams of rural utopia never materialized.