I'm told that the same thing happened quite recently to a London department store - it destroyed tons of food while it was doing a long-term forecast.
These destroyed food episodes were due to the company computers providing the wrong date when the food was frozen and manufactured. I hope it's plain by now - I'd better say at once that this is going to be a talk about Y2K - not to scare you off but to scare you on. Y2K, the year 2000. Y2K - probably the most ominous logo, the most threatening symbol to human life since e = mc2, the formula for the first atomic bomb.
I ought to have talked about this two years ago when most people who'd heard of Y2K thought of it as a puzzle - something like an acrostic for computer buffs - a simple, almost a comical, glitch that could be fixed right away. We all knew then how simple the problem was. Mainframe computers more than 10 years old - which surely most around the world are - were not programmed to handle a four digit year - as in two zero zero zero - 2000 AD. "Well," snapped Bertie Wooster - a friend of mine - "just add two digits I'd say".
How did it come about? To save storage space. Most programmers allocated two digits only to a year. In data or data files 1993 is 93, 1917 is 17. Same thing happened, by the way, in producing microchips and as recently as only three years ago. Now they're really sophisticated calculators of measurement of all kinds - but like the computers, chips that counted time were only designed - structured in the jargon - for this century. So when 1999 turns over to 2000 - the 21st Century - the chips and the software as they exist today will register not 2000 but 1900 AD.
And around the world all the civilised institutions we take for granted could stop working. The power grid of your city or county which takes in too your water supply, no telephones, transportation - all railroad traffic is computed and so is the coal that fires the power plants - the supertankers that ship in oil from the Middle or the Far East, the banking systems everywhere, all government services, health services, hospitals paralysed, police and fire services and all general business activity.
I know this is a drastic and melodramatic list. It does not however come from some supermarket scaremonger tabloid. I have quoted directly from a speech given by Senator Robert Bennett of Utah, delivered on 2 June to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC. Senator Bennett, who we may if we're lucky come to remember as a benefactor of the human race, is the Chairman of a Senate sub-committee - the Banking Sub-Committee on Technology and Financial Services - and he's the first notable politician in this country to sound the fire bell, a year ago, by holding the first hearings on Y2K.
So what's the reply to my friend Bertie Wooster? And to others even brighter, to anyone who thinks or thought - way back in 1991 say - that codes could be changed by any half way decent mathematician or newly trained programmer? Well the United States social security system began working - seven years ago - on its 30 million lines of code and by 1996 400 programmers had fixed only 6 million lines. The tax people - the Internal Revenue Service - began cleaning up, debugging, its 88,000 programs on its mainframe computers. By the end of last year it had debugged 2,000 only.
There's a software research firm that studies the productivity record of programmers and it's put out an estimate of the time it would take to fix and then to test all software that will currently be affected by Y2K: 700,000 person years. So unless somebody comes up with a miraculous new simple model for everybody there aren't enough programmers in the world - and there isn't enough time - before New Year's Day 2000.
Senator Bennett confessed in that historic speech to the strategic bigshots that his first exposure to the challenge of Y2K came when he decided to hold a hearing of his sub-committee to learn what effect Y2K might have on the banking system. It had crossed his mind that suddenly nobody might have verifiable assets - or could get at them.
When that first hearing was over a well known senator - Christopher Dodd of Connecticut - said: "Mr Chairman, this is scary stuff. We've got to have another meeting." They had six more which mainly managed to scare them more by revealing the scope of the task ahead, the billions of useless chips in many countries, the global urgency of the problem.
Senator Bennett stressed that so far the people who are most aware of the problem are big industries, a giant motorcar company for instance. He says: "If Y2K were to hit this coming weekend the company could not produce a single car in any one of its 157 manufacturing plants."
And then the senator made the sharp point that this is a management problem every bit as much as it's a technology problem. And the biggest mistake you can make, if you're a chief executive officer or even a manager, is to say: "The utilities people will fix it for your company in your country."
That had happened when he got a call from the head of a famous company who said: "We've taken care of everything, we started in 1996." Senator Bennett put to the man questions such as: "What happens when you get no dial tone on calls to any of your offices in Eastern Europe, Asia, South America? What happens when you can't transfer money into a branch office or do any banking overseas because their systems have broken down?" The man was embarrassed to say the least. "You'll have to talk to our top management," he said, "my responsibility was only to fix our computers".
Well of course the computer problem in all countries has to be solved first. Senator Bennett ended by repeating the seven areas of concern that I've mentioned and said the first that must be maintained is the power grid - power must be available even if every one of your computers has been repaired to comply with the turnover to 2000 AD and after power, water - every water purification plant in this country is run by a computed system.
Relaxing before, by now as you might guess, a thoroughly alert audience Senator Bennett warned: "If you can't fix it in the year and a half that's left develop now a contingency plan that'll see to it that at least you won't have to shut down."
Well I don't know how it is in your country but some governments have only just wakened up to the apocalypse that faces them 17 months from now. The American government waited far too long to appoint a man called, need I say here, a czar to concern himself exclusively on behalf of the whole presidential - the executive branch of government - with Y2K.
He began wisely by not dictating or organising action from the top, he went round to each cabinet officer - treasury, agriculture, state department, health, education and welfare and so on - and said: "You are wholly responsible for solving this thing in your own department".
The senator never tires of stressing the management responsibility when he talks to business men - big or small - who think of it as a computer problem simply and believe that rushing a lot of student programmers through their paces will turn up some Einstein or Newton who'll fix us all up by next summer.
The awful statistic I quoted about the turtle pace of the expert programmers employed by the Social Security system and the Internal Revenue Department should dispose of that illusion.
Mr Bennett ended by saying: "There's no possible doubt about it. Y2K is coming but don't, like Chicken Little, think the sky is falling in and all you can do is to plough up the backyard, put in the propane tank, a bomb shelter and a large supply of dried food that you can live on until the world finally comes back in three or four years. That kind of attitude," he said, "will turn into a self-fulfilling prophesy."
When people say to me: "Is the world coming to an end?" I say "I don't know." I don't know whether this will be a very bad bump in the road - that's the most optimistic assessment - or whether this will trigger a major worldwide recession with absolutely devastating economic and social consequences. We must recognise that the problem is coming and deal with it coldly, intelligently, efficiently. Don't panic but don't spend a lot of time asleep either.
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At the centre of things
That fateful night in Macbeth
Wishful thinking overload
A plea to the Senate
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The arrival of the golf hooligan
An historic devastator of the interior
Barkers at pleasure beach side shows
No exempt categories
Re-writing history
Grave concerns
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No word from Mount Olympus
Going to pot or to Pluto
Loneliness, male companionship and the hunt
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The brewing of racial storms
Air conditioning and changes in society
The first golden paratrooper
Playing for time
Freedom in America
Testing times in the advancement of science
Laws doomed from the start
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A course in manners
Two attitudes about China
These are my times and I must know them
No schadenfreude on Nato's birthday
What's your exit strategy?
Whatever it takes
The art and curse of television
In the hot seat
Doves, hawks, owls and the people
Wholesale flouting of the law
A natural gentleman
Played for a sucker
The pursuit of self-determination
Our long holiday from history is over
It ain't over, till it's over
Dot dot dash dash, over and out
The moral pillar and the moral contortionist
Striving for a more perfect Union
Trial of the century
Illuminating events with unpredictable results
America, 1998
Happy Christmas
Fantastical times in a modern world
Woe and loss of Eden
A reverential but cheerful air
Optimism versus pessimism
Indelible memories on this special occasion
My first thought was to protect him
Let's forget the whole topic
Rum, Romanism and rebellion
What was so special about John Glenn?
New words for objects new and old
Thou shalt not be found out
News off the back burner