APOCALYPSE, NO?

By CALVIN TRILLIN

I thought I might be having a bad week. First, a friend of mine who works in the telecommunications industry told me the Internet is going to go kerplop one of these days. Because it was never intended for the sort of use it's getting, he said, it isn't designed to be sufficiently "robust."

"How about redundant?" I said. "Doesn't it have enough redundancy to avoid infrastructure breakdown?" I didn't want him to think he was the only one who knew how to talk like an engineer.

"No redundancy to speak of," he said.

As I understood what he was saying--and I didn't actually understand it very well, because I know nothing about such subjects except that it sounds impressive to use words like redundancy--the Internet is going to do a cyberspace version of burning its little motor out, like a washing machine that has had too many bath towels in it too many times.

Well, O.K., I figured, the Internet crumps out. So what? Sure, I use it, but I could get along without it. I'm not a Web zombie. I'm not someone who is thrown into a tizzy by the thought that the athlete's-foot chat room will someday go dark. When nobody is logging on anywhere, I won't be wandering the streets buttonholing strangers who might just feel the need to share stories of unbearable itching.

What I'm saying is that I tried to distance myself from the situation. That is the normal human response. When it comes to disasters that are about to happen, most people try to figure out a way that the news doesn't apply to them.

Oddly enough, a day or two after I heard that the Internet was comparable to an abused Maytag, I was told about another impending technological disaster. "It never rains but it pours," my mother used to say--and she said that before the invention of even the plain-paper fax. A woman I know who works in data processing told me that even if many expensive adjustments are made beforehand, the year 2000 is likely to wreak havoc with the records of the financial industry.

As I understand what she was saying, this disaster will be less like an overloaded washing machine than a washing machine whose load consists of all your best white garments plus one magenta sweater that does not, contrary to the explicit statement on the label, hold its color.

Apparently computer records are kept in strings of digits, and only two digits in the string are used to designate the year. Calculations are based on constantly going to a higher number, and when 99 goes to 00, the computer will think it has gone to a lower number. (Sure, the computer should know better, but let's face it, computers are sometimes dumb as dirt.) Magenta will start to run. "As an example," I was told, "bonds that pay more as the number of the year goes higher will pay less because the number will be lower."

"I think I have some bonds like that already," I said. My financial affairs, in fact, have always looked as if they've been in the washing machine for a long time with a runny sweater. In other words, this would be nothing new. So, I figured, let the financial industry worry about its own data-processing problems. As Immanuel Kant used to say, "It don't make me no nevermind."

At that point, I started feeling pretty good. I'd dodged two disasters. I thought about trying to work out why global warming didn't apply to me. I figured I was on a roll. Then our washing machine broke.