IB note: The song copied below is exactly as saved by me, as an external file to my Lotus Agenda database on 1998-06-24 20:36hrs, approx. 3 months before I was assigned to work as a consultant to manage the Change Mangement component of a huge Y2K project for PLDT (Philippines Long Distance Telephones) - this was the major telco and (copper wire) telecomms network operator in the Philippines.
I didn't ask for the job, but was assigned to it and could not be picky or refuse it, as I had put my hand up for work in SE Asia (good experience to put on my CV). The consultancy was getting paid approx. US$1,000/day for each of the several (including myself) senior overseas consultants who had been assigned to the project. The client (PLDT) had put out a tender for the work, as they assumed they needed the work done as an urgent risk discovery and mitigation exercise.
We duly assiduously slogged away on the project, holding action meetings to identify the Y2K and other cross-project risks and develop plans for mitigation of same, and where necessary, padding out technical reports to hundreds of pages when 20 would probably have sufficed in many cases. It was like being paid by the word.
"Our clients are paying us a great deal of good money for this work and they expect long technical reports as deliverables and as evidence that we have thoroughly covered the ground and done the work they tendered.", as our lead consultant put it, after I had politely suggested that we could consider planning for an early completion, shortening the duration of the project and the length of the reports.
Our consultancy had bid for and won the tender for this lucrative project (probably after paying the usual
bribe agency marketing fee) and thus we were cynically hardly likely to be motivated to attempt to disabuse the clients of their largely false assumptions. (Who knows? They might have been right! Ha-ha.)
I promised myself that I would never allow myself to work on such a pointless, greedy and cynical exercise again.
The song below is actually quite good. It sounded quite rousing too, if a group of blokes with half-decent voices sang it together after lubricating their voiceboxes with half a dozen cans of San Miguel or Asahi Super-Dry beers. Or maybe the beer made it sound good. I forget. It was adopted as the unofficial "project song".
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Works best if you sing it out loud!!!
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Two Digits for a Date
(to the tune of "Gilligan's Island," more or less)
- Author Unknown
Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale
Of the doom that is our fate.
That started when programmers used
Two digits for a date.
Two digits for a date.
Main memory was smaller then;
Hard disks were smaller, too.
"Four digits are extravagant,
So let's get by with two.
So let's get by with two."
"This works through 1999,"
The programmers did say.
"Unless we rewrite by then
It all will go away.
It all will go away."
But Management had not a clue:
"It works fine now, you bet!
A rewrite is a straight expense;
We won't do it just yet.
We won't do it just yet."
Now when 2000 rolls around
It all goes straight to hell,
For zero's less than ninety-nine,
As anyone can tell.
As anyone can tell.
The mail won't bring your pension check
It won't be sent to you
When you're no longer sixty-eight,
But minus thirty-two.
But minus thirty-two.
The problems we're about to face
Are frightening, for sure.
And reading every line of code's
The only certain cure.
The only certain cure.
[key change, big finish]
There's not much time,
There's too much code.
(And Cobol-coders, few)
When the century is finished with,
We may be finished, too.
We may be finished, too.
Eight thousand years from now I hope
That things weren't left too late,
And people aren't then lamenting
Four digits for a date.
Four digits for a date.
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The Y2K bug:
