Y2K: Clocking on for work as the world parties

By Eugene Bingham

The millennium bug is catching. Not only are computers looking unreliable - staff are, too.

Employers who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars making sure their computers will operate on January 1, 2000, face an unexpected problem.

Will there be anyone around to flick the switches on?

Auckland health bosses have revealed that they are having to come up with incentives to ensure they have enough staff in the city's hospitals on New Year's Day.

But it is not fear of the Y2K bug that is causing the overwhelming rush of holiday requests: it is the lure of a good party.

"These are people who have spent their whole working life on shift work and this is the one time they don't want to make themselves available," the chief executive of Auckland Healthcare, Graeme Edmond, told Parliament's health select committee.

"They want to go and have a good time."

Police officers have already found that their bosses are not talking soft options such as incentives: leave over the New Year period has already been cancelled.

"The millennium goes beyond the usual New Year's Eve policing requirement," said Inspector Paul Brennan, of the operations support group at national headquarters.

On New Year's Eve, a special national operations room would operate to monitor and support activities in districts, and to liaise with other agency control centres throughout the night.

Planners were also preparing for other possible Y2K issues such as the impact of communities losing power or lighting, and what this might mean for public safety, he said.

Maternity units around the country are also having to ensure they have enough people to cope with the millennium rush. With parents apparently racing to be the first to produce offspring in the year 2000, staff are being placed on standby.

And it is not just midwives. A spokesman for a metropolitan hospital said yesterday: "Every maternity ward in this time-zone is going to become a media circus - I'm probably going to have to work, too."