15 - Growth Was in the Cards

Summary

Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her; but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game.

—Voltaire

Two letters and one numeral led the business news cycle in the two- to three-year stretch leading up to the ball dropping in Times Square to signal the beginning of the earth's third calendarial millennium … Y2K.

Predictions for horrific disasters of all scales ran rampant, based on the notion that all the technologically driven innovation of the previous decade would shut down based on a simple premise … computers and anything driven by them would be rendered unworkable because all these gadgets marked years with only two, not four, digits. Presumably, all these machines would read double zero on their internal clocks at the stroke of midnight and, “thinking” it was 1800 or 1900 and that they had not been invented, they would shut down.

Airplane guidance systems would fail, with planes crashing around the globe in sequence to respective time zones. Banks would crash as well, with no monetary tracking. And worse, Kronos time clocks would not tabulate hours worked!

The air of potential horror permeated everywhere as software experts around the globe sought to claim that their systems were Y2K-compliant.

Interestingly, and despite how ridiculous this sounds so many years later now knowing that these Nostradamus-esque forecasts bore no fruit, the calamity did cause a financial wrinkle in Kronos’ plans. Tech companies had been going gangbusters, driven by the dot-com boom and what was ultimately a Y2K version of “fake news.” Organizations the world over had ramped up tech spending to thwart the forecast of calamity. The ball dropped in Times Square and nothing popped but champagne corks, while the monies essentially borrowed from future budgets left many wells near dry entering the new millennium. Coupled with that drain came a downturn in the economy as dot-com after dot-com, buoyed initially by promises of great and wonderous things blossoming with the advent of the Internet, went belly-up.

It could have been life-sapping at the young Kronos but for what could be termed a paper-thin safety net … time cards!