Glitches on cards after Y2K rollover

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

While New Zealand's major computer systems and essential services have rolled over to 2000 unscathed, businesses could still experience a flurry of minor problems as they switch their computers back on this week.

Some will be genuine Y2K errors. A likely source of trouble is older standalone PCs which may show the wrong date when they are restarted.

But not all the problems will be directly the result of Y2K. Ordinary machine failures and operator mistakes might be blamed on Y2K in the coming weeks while the spotlight is still on the millennium rollover.

Several thousand customers of Farmers Trading, for example, were surprised just before New Year when they received statements urging them to make payments by a date in 1920.

"It was not a systems issue. All Farmers systems have been Y2K tested," said Wayne Walden, Farmers group managing director. He blamed the problem on "incorrect inputs at the time of printing" at Mount Wellington-based Datamail, which produces the company's statements under contract.

Mr Walden said the problem had been spotted after two print runs and had affected only a small fraction of the 500,000 people in the database.

Andrew Corbett, delivery services general manager at Datamail, said the problem had been caused by a programmer entering "incorrect dates" but said it was not Y2K related. He said the problem was fixed very soon after it was noticed and no other Datamail customers had been affected.

Similarly, a day before New Year's Eve, Mobil service stations in Northland suffered a programming glitch causing some customers to be overcharged for petrol, but it had nothing to do with the millennium bug.

Mobil spokeswoman Rowan Macrae said the problem stemmed from incorrect programming of about half a dozen petrol stations in the Northland area. The pumps had been programmed for a marketing promotion. When it ended, the pumps had reverted to too high a price.

Ms Macrae said the glitch had been fixed. Customers who had been overcharged could get a refund by presenting a receipt at the station where they bought the petrol.

A genuine Y2K glitch has hit The Listener. It was unable to publish in its current edition video recorder G-codes in its TV listings because of a tailor- made extension to its Quark Xpress layout program. Editor Finlay Macdonald said the program refused to read G codes beginning with 00.

"It was a foreseeable problem, but one that was so deeply buried that it was overlooked. We think we've fixed it, but we had to go back to manual labour - typing the codes in by hand."

A billing problem hit some New Zealand Herald subscribers before Christmas. Their invoices had a payment due date of 19 January 1900. A letter apologising for an early appearance of the Y2K problem was swiftly sent out to the readers concerned.

However, Gary McKenzie, chief information officer of Wilson & Horton, publisher of the Herald, said "the letter was wrong." He said the 1900 date had been incorrectly typed into a text field by a clerk.

"It's not a Y2K problem at all," Mr McKenzie said.

At the height of the celebrations, a 15-minute shutdown of the aging NZ Police central computer, planned weeks ago, led some officers on duty to believe it had crashed.

"We had a planned outage of LES (the Law Enforcement System) across the whole justice sector from 11.55 pm to 12.10 am," said Police spokesman Michael Player.

"Some officers were unaware of that decision", Mr Player added, so they may have been surprised when it wasn't responding at midnight."