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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 January 2000 Issue No. 463 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 January 2000 Issue No. 463
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Heritage Millennium Features Profile Living Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Business as usual
By Amira HoweidyOur cars drove, the fridge worked, the toilets flushed and we had water and electricity just like every other day. Business as usual? The answer, it seems, is yes. Y2K doomsters seem to have been proven wrong and the world did not grind to a halt, neither with a bang nor a whimper. Minor problems did occur worldwide but the bug didn't bite -- not yet, or so it seems.
However, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates was quick to issue warnings that millennium glitch problems could occur in the coming weeks. The vast majority of Y2K worriers voiced the same concern, arguing that real problems might not appear until later in the month when companies try to print invoices or payroll checks.
But the impact of off-the-wall Y2K predictions has been so effective worldwide that even people here -- where some 50 per cent of the population is illiterate -- had been arming themselves against this invisible enemy for several week.
Some, like 58-year old Fatma Abdel-Razek, filled her car with petrol, bought canned food, three cartons of mineral water and two power generators. "I really didn't know what to do, but I bought all these things after I heard the warnings issued by some western embassies here," she said.
The shopping frenzy was in full swing anyway, taking advantage of a string of festive occasions that made December and the first half of January the most unusual in years. Egypt's food consumption doubles during the month of Ramadan -- which this year coincided with millennium celebrations. Add to this the coincidence of the Muslim and Coptic feasts and Y2K "precautions" and you have a heady recipe for an orgy of shopping. One of the largest Heliopolis supermarkets, for example, was void of any soft drinks last Friday morning, and short of mineral water. But the manager insisted nothing was unusual. "What two zeros are you talking about?" he asked. "Everything is normal, nothing went wrong."
Sales at petrol stations did not go up substantially despite the bug panic, says Ashraf El-Rashidi, owner of a MobilOil Mohandessin petrol station. "The employees of western embassies have been filling up their cars with petrol and even storing some. They advised me to do the same, which I never did. Everything is perfect, just as we expected it to be," he told the Weekly.
And this is what officials have been stressing before, and more convincingly, after 31 December. Ihab Hafez, spokesman for the government's Y2K committee, announced earlier this week that vital utilities such as electricity and the banking and aviation sectors were not affected. The Cairo Stock Exchange resumed its daily activities last Sunday, without any significant problems.
So were we that ready? "Well, yes, we started taking the necessary measures as early as May 1998," said Mustafa Kamel, an official with the cabinet's Information and Decision Support Centre (IDSC) which set up a taskforce to monitor any millennium glitch problems. "There were minor problems which were so insignificant they didn't affect the institutions," he added. IDSC established 1,400 emergency centres across the nation which, stressed Kamel, "didn't report worthwhile incidents."
"We are not sufficiently automated in the first place to expect major problems. On the other hand, there was too much exaggeration of expected problems. We were worried, but didn't go as far as other countries that spent billions of dollars on this," argued Kamel. "On the other hand, the fear was justified because no one knew exactly what to expect."
But Information Technology [IT] experts warn that although major problems are unexpected, the minor ones should not be underestimated. Salah Nasr, secretary-general of the Egyptian Software Association and a consultant for several banks, told the Weekly that the Giza Traffic Department issued traffic tickets reading 1900, instead of 2000, early this week. Moreover, he said, seven or eight currency exchange offices did not even have Y2K compliant applications or computers. In some banks employees had to do much of the work manually because a multi-national computer provider didn't carry out the necessary Y2K testing. Similar problems were encountered in the private health sector, he added.
"We can't say we're 100 per cent safe," he said, "because this only applies to end-of-day procedures, not end-of-the-month or end-of-the-year for that matter." Moreover, he warned, "there is still the 29 February bug which the computer won't read unless it can read the year 2000. We don't even know that the oil or electricity sectors will be operating properly."
"No one can predict what will happen. We simply have to wait," he said. And so says Bill Gates.
