Awaiting the End of Millennium Malarkey

The millennium approaches. So what?

Every political speech in the recent campaign seemed to implore us to do this or to stop doing that in order to properly prepare ourselves and our society for the new millennium bearing down on us. Even the pope, while visiting last year, prayed that we should ready ourselves for the millennium by treating the less fortunate among us with more compassion.

You’ll get no argument here that we should treat the less fortunate among us with more compassion. And we probably should begin to do this and stop doing that. What isn’t clear to me is what the coming of the millennium has to do with it. Was it any less important to provide new textbooks to inner-city schools in 1936 than in 1996?

And when does the new millennium begin? Conventional wisdom is that it makes its formal entrance on Jan. 1, 2000, but as is often the case, conventional wisdom is not so wise. The year 2000 is the end of this century, not the beginning of the next. We began counting the modern calendar years with the year 1, not the year 0, so the first century ended in the year 100, and the next one began in 101.

All this confusion because we use the decimal, or base 10, number system. Our decades end with one zero, our centuries with two zeros and our millenniums with three zeros, which makes it seem like such a big deal. It is apparently such a big deal that we use the Latin plural form.

The current millennium doesn’t seem to be going out in a burst of glory. Computer wizards tried to save a few bytes here and there by considering only the last two digits of the year. The global economy depends on subtracting two dates to figure out how much you owe, but at the end of the decade they will not be subtracting 1999 from 2000, but 99 from 00. That means that if I don’t pay my December ’99 electric bill on time, the utility company computer will either send me a courtesy note to tell me that my payment is 99 years late or it will have to send me a refund for my overpayments for the last 99 years.

The word on the street is that Bill Gates is working on a solution to this dilemma. Maybe by the end of the century we will understand that mankind’s behavior is not going to change merely because of the calendar. Perhaps they will get so tired of all this fuss about the millennium that they will stop bothering the rest of us about it.