No Fear

Remember Y2K?
I do. A little more than twenty years ago, there was a concentrated beam of paranoia surrounding the digits on computer calendars. It seems that a great many of them were installed without anything past the tens place. What would happen when we jumped from the nineteen hundreds to the two thousands?
A lot of people believed it would be the end of life as we know it. Power grids would fail. Bank accounts would disappear. Anything with a computer in it would emit a shower of sparks, shoot up in the air and fall uselessly to the ground. Consequently, a lot of people got jobs writing code to shore up the digital infrastructure of the world and its interconnected systems. These were men and women working on a pretty serious deadline. If everything wasn't in place, once midnight struck on January first 2000, everything would go (as a friend of mine used to say) gont flondernootz.
I was working as a computer teacher in an elementary school at the time, and I got questions from students, parents and staff about the coming apocalypse several times a day leading up to our Christmas break in 1999. "Should I stock up on batteries? Water? What about my checking account? Is it safe?"
I did the best I could, back then, to assure anyone who would listen to me that I was reasonably certain that everything would be fine when the sun came up on New Year's Day. Reasonably certain. I went so far as to scoff at anyone who brought it up. At the time, I was not basing this on any specific knowledge of programming or data storage. I was just pretty sure that no one would simply let chaos reign if it could be helped. It should be noted here that as the "Computer Teacher At An Elementary School," my voice of quiet reason was enough to quell the fears of the general populace.
Which didn't keep it from being quite the fracas nonetheless. People winced in anticipation as the new millennium swept across the globe. I calmed myself with the notion that if anything terrible happened, we would be able to see it coming, with nearly half a day's warning to prepare. As it turned out, there were some errors. One hundred fifty Lotto machines in Delaware stopped working. It was not, as so many had feared, "the end of the world as we knew it." I woke up gratified and smug, pleased to have been the voice of reason amid the doomsayers.
But I guess the good news here is that, in a pinch, we as a global community can generate panic on an epic scale. Which will come in handy once the alien transports arrive in 2022.