NOTEBOOK -- steve marble

Purists may quibble, scientists may insist otherwise but the computer has

decided that we will enter a new millennium in 58 days.

At the stroke of midnight.

And it is with a sense of looming dread and tremendous uncertainty that I

count off the days, waiting for everything to change, waiting for the

great unexpected.

There is nothing, if you listen long enough and look hard enough and

think and think and think until your brain aches, that isn’t going to be

affected in that brief nanosecond when we roll into the new millennium,

all four digits changing.

At least that’s what I’ve heard. The truth of the matter is that I’m just

not bright enough to really get my arms around this millennium issue,

beyond the vague notion that some computers will think it’s 1900 and

every bit of forward progress we’ve made in the last 10 decades will be

vaporized.

I turn to the Internet for help.

Log on to Yahoo and carefully type in “millennium.” Stripped down. Just

one word. No additives. Just millennium. Waiting. Waiting. Watling. Here

we go: 10,000 Web pages to browse. So much information. So little concept

of what it all means.

But I see the hints of what might be waiting for us around the corner, a

surreal vision of waking up New Year’s morning and hearing the power

lines snap.

Suddenly, everything comes to a halt. The ATM machines freeze, the gas

pumps click off, the world economy crashes, a dark chill comes over the

Earth and we are left to wander like common hobos into the next century.

I turn to my friends, my neighbors, my co-workers for advice. Are you

preparing for the millennium?

“Nothing,” a friend tells me. “Nothing really big.”

Like?

“We have the motor home all set,” he says, explaining that it’s fully

fueled, propane tanks topped off, about a month’s supply of water, canned

goods and dried foods stored aboard. That’s all.

I have, I think, a six-pack of Diet Pepsi, some Arrowhead water, an old

earthquake kit I can no longer find in my garage and a freezer full of

rainbow trout left over from a fishing trip to Mammoth Lakes. Not exactly

a millennium plan.

What about my savings, my tiny portfolio of stocks and bonds, my 401(k)

plans? Again, I reach out for answers.

“Well, I’m going to shift all my mutuals into a money market,” a neighbor

tells me. Stocks? Anticipating a huge market tumble, he’s planning to

sell those, too.

“Probably about a week out, I’ll buy back into the stocks, get ‘em on the

cheap,” he adds. Always thinking, this neighbor of mine.

I ponder my finances and decide it all sounds like too much work. Plus,

I’d probably muck it up somehow and move my money into the one account in

the whole world that really does vanish.

The computer itself remains the chief worry.

One of my friends has a three-page battery of tests, program upgrades and

carefully choreographed downloads from various Internet sites that he has

prepared for the average computer user. He gave me a copy. It’s still

sitting next to my computer. I think my daughter jotted down a friend’s

e-mail address on it one time. Other than that, it’s been put to

absolutely no good.

In the back of my mind, I keep thinking that I’ll simply open up the

control panel and move the date back to 1998 or 1997. Both pretty good

years in my book. Or I’ll just live 1999 all over again. It was also a

fine year.

But that seems too simple. Even for me. Three choices, then. Wade through

that three-page opus. Buy a new computer. Or just print out everything I

need to keep and sit back and see what happens.

Part of me is nervous. Years and years ago, the common worry was that the

computer would someday run our lives, make our jobs obsolete. But as time

went along, the computer created more jobs than it eliminated and didn’t

run our lives so much as simplified them.

But in 58 days, we may find that those original prophets of doom were

right.

The other part of me envisions a New Year’s day that unfolds peacefully.

The sun comes up, the Balboa Island Ferry chugs gracefully across the

bay, the paper lands with a thud on the driveway, the coffee simmers just

like always down at Diedrich’s and life is remarkable, just like it was

the day before.

Cheers.

* STEVE MARBLE is the managing editor of Times Community News and can be

reached at o7 Steve.Marble@latimes.comf7