LOUIS BURKE | Culture | CONTACT
After millions of years of adapting to survive, humans have lived through the odd rough patch or two and continue to do so today in the face of a deadly world wide pandemic.
As we approach nearly two years of living with this current virus, it is worth reflecting on what we’ve learnt in this time and how this often hysteric time period has been much more of a whirlwind than the Y2K problem ever turned out to be.
Short for The Year 2000, Y2K was a term used to describe the potential mass error of global timekeeping software failing to make the clocks move ahead from 1999 to 2000, causing an economic turndown, large power outages and planes to fall from the sky.
In the months leading up to the new Millenium, nightly news reports outlined how Y2K would be an end to life as we know it, leaving all nations on Earth in a squabbling, post-apocalyptic mess.
Of course, historians will remember that as the clock struck midnight on January 1st 2000, everything was in fact fine and Sydney still got to host a cracking Olympic games that year.
Yet now as the Earth faces an actual economy-crushing threat of death, economists can’t help but wonder if Y2K did arrive, just later and wearing a facemask.
“We thought it would be the end of days but we got it wrong by about 20 years,” said one man who is not an economist but is packing a cone during illegal kick-ons.
“Air travel is fucked. I mean, it’s not planes falling out of the sky but it sure is a hell of a lot harder to get a flight right now.”
