When the Year 2000 problem came up before the Senate Banking Committee earlier this week, Republican Senator Phil Gramm had an unusual take on the issue. It seems to me we ought to be encouraged that in the year 1000 they had to add a new digit, and you had no evidence of economic disruption, Gramm said. And then the millennium before, we had dates going down, and then they started going up, and yet no evidence of disruption or chaos in the economy, so if they could do it then, surely we could deal with it now, it seems to me.
At this point Robert Bennett, a Republican Senator from Utah, weighed in with a real-life example of the havoc wrought by Y2K. I have a relative, Mr. Chairman, if you’ll indulge me, who has a tombstone that is not Y2K-compliant, Bennett said. When her husband died, they put in two dates, one for his birth date and death date, and they put her birth date, and then her death date they carved in ’19’, and she’s outfoxed them by outliving them, and they’re going to have to putty it in and put in ’20’ when she finally dies. Yet the irrepressible Gramm had an answer for that one too. Well, he said, she still has another six months.
