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Making
things happen - with integrity. A Weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday, January 3, 2000 Volume II Number 1
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FOCUS - Contingencies
For us, January 1, 2000 at 12:02 AM EST, the lights went out.
The darkness was startling. And complete. Everything attached to an electric cord went out. Dead as a Dickensonian door nail.
Stunned, I could only say, “No way. No way.” Our crowd of celebrants went silent. The whole house went still at mid-night. Black as an unlit tunnel deep in an Appellation coal mine.
Carolyn and I brought in the New Millennium at Pilgrim’s Rest. It’s a quiet hideaway perched on a Blue Ridge Mountain on the edge of Great Smoky Mountain National Park just above Maryville, Tennessee. Pilgrim’s Rest is named after a retreat of the same name made famous in the timeless novel, Pilgrim’s Progress. The legendary Appellation Trail follows the ridgeline for over one hundred thirty-five miles north to south - up to six and seven thousand feet elevation and down into the forested valleys. There are expansive meadows, mountain lakes and trout streams with waterfalls and white water tumbling over the rocks, water dancing in the sunlight.
On a clear day, the whole hundred-mile panorama can be seen from the broad front porch of Pilgrims Rest.
Just down the holler and around the bend
the sleepy little town of Townsend provided the backdrop for a television
series based on the classic Catherine Marshall novel – Christy.
The familiar opening scenes for the short-lived weekly program (we
thought deserved to be a permanent family series for a decade or more) were
shot from the ridge at Pilgrim’s Rest.
This is the scenery we’ve enjoyed since our arrival in this picture
perfect part of the world.
On New Year’s Eve we were two families celebrating the passing of a Millennium in the Great Room of Pilgrim’s Rest. We poured the Champaign. Made some toasts to love and marriage and family. Raised our glasses in the direction of the television set. Following a rather predictable speech by our tuxedoed President (a droning treatise on the virtues of peace, prosperity, unity, brotherhood and the redistribution of wealth), Fox News aimed the cameras at Times Square and some two million partiers as we counted down the clock all together - Eastern Standard Time - precisely three hours sooner than our California friends back home. A state of the art surround sound system filled the Great Room with the music and singing and shouting of the Big Apple.
FIVE! FOUR! THREE! TWO! ONE! YEAH!!! Fireworks popped, exploding colored streamers streaked across the night sky of New York.
Hugs all around.
Less than a minute later – a “pop!” and everything went dark. Really dark.
No way. No way.
I can only tell you that in a flash, a hundred thoughts raced through my mind. What do we do now? And I thought, wow, all that smug talk about how this is no big deal; how often I told family friends and clients that the whole Y2K thing was little more than a Shakespearian tempest – full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. What if…
And then as quickly as it left, the power returned. Just like that. “Pop!” The lights on the Christmas tree. The TV. The surround sound. The Great Room came back to life.
And clomping up the wooden steps from the basement of Pilgrim’s Rest came two collegians, the two only sons from each of our families, suddenly exposed as co-conspirators, both laughing hysterically. And we knew.
In the wonderful chaos of celebration, those two rascals had slipped out of the room unnoticed, down the stairs and into the basement and straight for the electrical power box. Undetected, they threw the main switch.
And for less than a minute they also threw us into the world of the unthinkable. In the darkness, I thought perhaps the doomsayers and the cynics and the Prophets of Apocalypse and the merchants of Y2K Preparedness Paraphernalia just may have been right after all. I even wondered if at that very moment we might just hear a trumpet blast from the clouds above announcing the arrival of the next Dispensation.
I suppose you would say that it’s a sign of their maturity and general good sense that our private little black-out lasted less than a minute. Kevin and Jamie certainly could have kept the charade going much longer, at the risk of general panic and perhaps bodily injury. It may well have triggered an ominous tightening in the chest for at least two of us older guys, or maybe a fall, a cracking of the head on the corner of the coffee table or some such other calamity.
But the boys showed some sense and left the power out only long enough for us to know the sheer terror of Y2K come true for a single unforgettable moment.
The silence was broken by the return of sound and light. A collective sigh of relief was released into the atmosphere as we pondered the uproar of male laughter drifting up the stairwell.
As the truth sunk in – the hugs resumed – and the New Millennium began.
Candy took to the Baby Grand and led us in a stirring rendition of Auld Lang Syne.
* * * * * * * *
The next morning, we tuned in to CNN. Mostly, we wanted to know if the civilized world had remained intact while we slept.
Apparently we were not alone in that concern. The top story for most every news program was a Y2K update, reports from every conceivable command post from all over the globe. And as you know by now, the reports were mainly boring.
It was as though the entire world had every microchip in existence under surveillance. Nearly none misbehaved.
There was a team of guys buried in a concrete bunker way under the Colorado Rockies monitoring every missile launch pad known to the modern world – watching for a possible accidental midnight launch. The screens didn’t even blip. It was a long slow night.
The White House set up a command post. The most sophisticated communications system in the world stood at the ready just in case there was a national power out… the President was in the wings all night long should he be called upon to address a panicked nation – filling in the detail of an atomic blast or a terrorist attack or the release of toxic gasses into the atmosphere or a regional power out or some other made for prime time catastrophe – it had all the essential ingredients of a Hollywood feature length action thriller. The only word from the White House Command Post all night long was that there was no word.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York ordered the printing up of a couple of billion dollars in cold hard cash. The green stuff was stashed in cash machines all over the country in anticipation of a run on pocket money. Reports are that few if any machines ran out. The extra cash had no apparent affect on inflation.
Utilities, banks, brokerage houses, webmasters, municipalities, hospitals, universities, school districts, even churches hired Y2K specialists to over-see systems that just might fail. None did.
FAA, NASA, the US Department of Transportation and the Department of Energy all checked out. Nothing to report. Airplanes flew. Elevators ran. Telephones connected. ATMs coughed up cash. Power plants provided power.
The guys at the Pentagon command post got so bored they popped in a videotape of the Francis Ford Coppola film Apocalypse Now until someone reported them to the media. News outlets were so hungry for something to say that it became a story. The guys turned it off.
* * * * * * * * * *
Here we are, the Monday morning after, and it’s easy to dismiss the whole thing as one more costly exercise in futility - tax dollars and corporate profits down the proverbial drain.
But that’s a cynical view. The passage of the Millennium in relative peace without the wholesale disruption of the systems that sustain and power this economic engine is rather a tribute to effective contingency planning and preparedness.
Sometimes, we do get it right.
We need to listen to the prophets of doom. They give us warning. We need to take time to think about back-up plans. Murphy’s Law (“If it can go wrong, it will.”) is alive and well. The most successful among us are prepared for regular visitations from the Murphman.
* * * * * * * * *
Welcome to the year 2000. It’s a new beginning. You are poised to make your life count. The possibilities are endless.
Take a deep breath. A good part of the uncertainty has disappeared. Deep down, like the rest of us, you’ve been wondering if the New Year would mean lights out or lights on.
The lights are on, good friend. The systems are operational. Most of those systems, thanks to the fear of a two-digit demon, are upgraded.
It’s time to go after your piece of the action.
We’re gunna do it together. You and me.
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2000
Special Thanks to our good friends Randy and Marsha Ostrander, Owners of Pilgrim's Rest
and to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
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