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A thousand plus a thousand is... Playing the Numbers Game -- Again?By Rick Horowitz Are you ready for the recount? Get ready for the recount. There's going to be a recount as sure as I'm sitting here, as sure as fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly. I'm not talking about an election recount, you understand -- not a presidential caucus, not a primary, not even the latest hot contest for Miss Industrial-Strength Floor Wax. I'm talking about: The Millennium. It's about to happen. (You knew that.) And then happen again. You can feel the excitement, can't you, as the days dwindle down to a precious few? It won't be long before that big odometer in the sky turns over, and all that waiting, all that anticipating, are behind us, and finally the big day is here at last. Talk about a once-in-a-lifetime experience! Or twice. See, there's the millennium that begins on January 1, 2000. And then there's the millennium that begins on January 1, 2001. You've heard the argument, right? The purists have been insisting for who-knows-how-long that this coming New Year's Day is a perfectly run-of-the-mill New Year's Day, that since, when people started counting these things, they didn't start with Year 0 but with Year 1, then the first decade had to run from Year 1 through Year 10 -- the end of Year 10 -- and likewise the first century ended at the end of Year 100 and the first millennium at the end of Year 1000, and so it's only logical that this second millennium, every bit as deserving of a full thousand-year run as its predecessor, doesn't end until the end of the year 2000, which means the new millennium doesn't actually start until January 1, 2001. That's what the purists have been saying. And everybody else says, "That's nice -- let's party!" Logic's got nothing to do with it. We want our fun and we want it now. OK, so it's not all about fun. It's hard to ignore that annoying little Y2K problem, for instance; there's nothing like the prospect of computers melting, cities exploding and planes falling out of the sky every few seconds to attract a bit of extra attention to the arrival of the computer age's first Double Zero. And just think of all the folks who've been turning a tidy little profit pushing the prospect of imminent doom, selling Y2K fixes (to the optimists) and Y2K survival gear (to everyone else). So naturally people are focused on 1/1/00. That's the other thing, of course, driving the premature-exhilaration machine: profit. You think we're impatient when it comes to fun? We're even worse when it comes to money. Say you've got your own stack of millennial goods to peddle -- the Official Millennium tiara or toothpick, cruise package or candlestick, leopard skin or lavaliere or lava lamp -- and you can goose your cash flow this year or wait another 12 months for the numerically correct millennium to show up. No doubt about it. You grab it. Now. But what if you can do both? What if you can have this millennium, and that millennium, too? Impossible? You just watch. The ball will come down at the stroke of midnight and the world will go slightly crazy, and approximately five minutes after the last reveler has been swept into the trash bin and the last bit of cash has been squeezed out of every conceivable millennially connected gimcrack and geegaw, the captains of commerce will step forward and say: "You know, on second thought..." And they'll tell you how they've been going over the numbers again, and how the purists were right, after all; the new millennium really does start in 2001. And wouldn't you know it? They just happen to have a few choice items on hand for immediate purchase, and a few million more on the way. Will it be as big a deal as the first time around? Probably not. Will that stop them from trying? Are you kidding? That would be once in a lifetime. Posted 11/30/99.
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Rick Horowitz