neorants

[ The following was originally posted on Wed, Dec 15 12:00:00 1999, LONG before the recent site overhaul, but is posted here in case you're just tuning in -- and I'd just like to add, I called it right ;) ]

Call me crazy, a wild man, if you will, but I haven’t put a dime back for Y2K. I haven’t squirreled away food, and don’t plan on taking money out of my bank account “just in case.” Furthermore, I’d like to say that if you do, you are a moron. Let me explain, before you go hating me before my first rant is complete. You can hate me afterwards. :)

In this world, there are the type of people that enjoy haunted houses and horror films. They will pay good money for people to scare them — for a rush, for whatever — I don’t know. I’m not one of those people. Why not? No matter how hard I try to lose myself in the atmosphere, I keep coming back to reality, which is this — the real world is scary enough, and I just wasted my hard-earned money for at most, a startle or two. The fear is no more real than the mask on the young minimum-wage slave that chases you through the corridors of the haunted house. It’s about convincing as the notion that attractive young women in tantalizing underwear wander an old house at night alone, in order to investigate some creak they hear while lying in bed. So, even if I were the kind of person that got my jollies by being scared, I’d still not be impressed. What does this have to do with Y2K? Oh, yeah…

The companies selling generators, firearms, and groceries in containers the size of which could feed the entire population of a third world country are absolutely LOVING people who like fear right now. These people won’t admit it, but they are actually looking forward to a crisis of the proportions some of the mainstream media predicts, if only to bring some modicum of interest into their ho-hum lives. After all, many of these people didn’t live through the great depression, and they need something that they can lord over their kids too! “Kids, when Y2K hit, I was prepared! I holed up in my bunker for months, fending off the hordes of unprepared losers who wanted some of my hard earned and wisely stashed stuff with gunfire from my automatic weapons!” I’ve got to admit, that would make one heck of a story. But, like it or not, my fear-loving friends, it probably won’t happen that way. Y2K will just be another day. Another day with a few computer glitches here and there, but another day nonetheless. Remember your days in grade school, high school, and, God forbid, possibly even college, where you’d have a short power outage? Remember the kids who invariably would scream and cheer like something totally awe-inspiring had just happened, only to see the lights come on in mere seconds, when they would frown and whine disappointedly? The Y2K catastrophist is one of these guys, all grown up, and none the smarter.