GeoCities.us
» Heartland » Farm|
GeoCities.us
» Heartland » Farm |
Get your FREE home page! |
 |
 QUEEN FARM Y2K COMPLIANCE OFFICE Elton Queen, Inspector (Retired) · near Eau Claire, Wisconsin Office hours: kitchen table, after dinner, most days |
|
My name is Elton Queen. I milked cows on this place for forty-four years, from 1952 until 1996, when I handed the whole operation over to my son Eric and his wife Lesa. Wanda and I moved across the road into the little house, and I moved my chair to the window where I can watch Eric do it differently. Eric reads all the farm papers. Last winter he came home from a meeting at the co-op and talked for an hour straight about the Year 2000 problem, and somewhere in the second half hour I thought, well, somebody on this place had better look into it properly. I am retired. I have the time. So in February I opened the Queen Farm Y2K Compliance Office at the kitchen table, and I have now tested every machine and animal on the farm. Full results are below. WHAT THE BUG IS (AS BEST I UNDERSTAND IT) A lot of computers were built to save room by writing the year with two numbers instead of four: 99 for 1999. When 99 rolls over to 00, some of them may decide it's 1900, and anything they figure by the date, like a bill or an interest payment or when to service something, could come out wrong. That's the whole bug. The banks and the power companies and the government have spent a great deal of money finding those computers and fixing them, and I'm grateful they did. So the question I asked of everything on this farm was a simple one. Does it have a computer in it, and does that computer care what year it is? A thing with no computer in it can't have the problem. A thing with a computer that doesn't keep the year can't have it either. That doesn't leave much on a dairy farm. But I was thorough. |
|
|
| TEST RESULTS Tests performed February through September, 1999. Inspector: E. Queen. | ||
| 1952 Farmall tractor Test: Bought it new the spring I started. Looked it over front to back, top to bottom, and underneath on a creeper. Finding: An engine, four tires, a seat, and a toolbox with a parts receipt from 1961 in it. No computer. A wren's nest under the hood, empty. Started on the second try. |
| |
| The Holsteins (68 head, Eric's now) Test: Walked through the barn at evening milking and asked them what year it was. Finding: No answer. They have never read a calendar. A cow knows morning, she knows evening, and she knows when you're late. That's all the date a cow needs, and January 1 won't change any of it. |
| |
| The rooster Test: Wrote down every time he crowed for one week in May. Finding: 4:10 in the morning, 4:52, 2:30 in the afternoon, 11:15 at night, and every single time the milk truck pulled in. He does not keep accurate time now. I don't see how the year 2000 makes him any worse, but I can't certify a rooster with a record like that. |
| |
| Kitchen clock radio Test: Unplugged it and plugged it back in. Finding: Blinks 12:00, same as it does after every thunderstorm. It doesn't know the year, the month or the day. Most mornings it barely knows the hour. |
| |
| Wanda's bread machine Test: Read the instruction book twice, cover to cover. Finding: It has a timer so it can start the bread while you sleep. Nowhere in it is there a calendar. It does not know it's 1999, and I'm not going to be the one to tell it. Wanda's comment on the inspection: "Leave it alone, Elton." |
| |
| Cuckoo clock (living room) Test: Wound it. Finding: Weights, chains, gears and one small wooden bird. That bird has never known what year it is and doesn't intend to start. |
| |
| The milking system (Eric's, put in 1997) Test: Asked Eric. Finding: This one has real computers in it. It reads each cow's tag and weighs her milk. Eric says the dealer has checked it over and it's fine, and the dealer sent a letter saying so. I don't understand it well enough to test it myself, so I'm taking their word, which is what you do with a dealer you've done business with for twenty years. |
| |
| Bulk tank Test: Stood next to it while it ran. Finding: A compressor and a thermostat. It keeps the milk cold, and it would keep it cold in 1900 too. |
| |
| 1989 pickup truck Test: Drove it to town and back. Finding: Eric says there's a small computer in the engine, but it only runs the motor and doesn't keep a calendar. The clock in the dashboard has been eleven minutes fast since 1991, so it's not keeping track of much. |
| |
| The VCR Test: Tried to set it to tape a program on New Year's Day. Finding: The year on the setup screen won't go past 99. Then again, I have never once gotten it to tape anything in any year, so I don't expect any change. My grandson Jared, who is eight, will look into it at Thanksgiving. |
| |
| The farm computer (Lesa's, for the books, bought 1998) Test: Eric put the Year 2000 update on it and ran a checking program a fellow at the co-op gave him on a floppy disk. Finding: Eric says it passed. I checked the solitaire myself. It works. |
| |
| My wristwatch Test: Looked at it. Finding: Shows the day of the month in a little window. No year. I set it ahead by hand at the end of every short month and have since 1971. |
| |
| The feed mill calendar (by the back door) Test: Turned it to December. Finding: Ends December 31, 1999. No provision of any kind for the year 2000. This is the only item on the farm that fails outright. A replacement is expected in the mail in December, the same as every year since 1952. |
| |
| The barn cats (seven, more or less) Test: None. They would not hold still for it. Finding: They don't acknowledge the year. They don't acknowledge me either, except at milking time, when the dish comes out. |
| |
| Wanda Test: Not tested. Not going to be tested. Finding: Forty-six years married. Has handled every change that ever came down the road, including me retiring. I'm not worried about January. |
| |
| The inspector Test: Reviewed my own record on New Year's Eve. Finding: Sixty-seven New Year's Eves, awake at midnight for maybe ten of them. Cows don't care what you did the night before. May not make it to midnight this year either, millennium or no millennium. |
| |
| SUMMARY: 16 items inspected. 12 COMPLIANT (two of those on somebody else's say-so). 3 UNDER REVIEW: the rooster, the VCR and the inspector. 1 NOT COMPLIANT: the feed mill calendar. |
|
GET YOUR OWN CERTIFICATE Print this out and fill it in. No charge. I've sent out thirty-one so far by request, mostly for neighbors' tractors, one for a Lutheran church's pipe organ, and one for a man's mother-in-law, which I issued with reservations.
|
|
WHAT WE'RE REALLY DOING All joking aside, here is what Eric and Lesa are doing to get the farm ready for New Year's, which is about the same as what any dairy farm up here does for a bad winter anyway. The generator. Cows have to be milked and the milk has to be cooled whether the power is on or not, so every dairy farm around here that's been through an ice storm keeps a generator. Ours runs off the tractor's power take-off. We've had to hook it up in a hurry more times than I can count. Eric tested it in September and will run it again the week after Christmas. Feed. There's feed put up for the winter, the same as there is every fall in Wisconsin, Y2K or not. A little cash. Wanda and I will keep a few twenties in the coffee can over the holiday, the same as we would before a blizzard. Not a lot. The bank sent a letter saying they're ready and I believe them. But a few twenties in the coffee can never hurt anybody. The co-op's letter. Our electric co-op sent a letter this spring saying they've tested their equipment and expect no trouble, and that they'll have crews on duty New Year's Eve anyway, the same as on a storm night. The dairy co-op says the milk trucks will run on the first and second of January like any other days. That was Eric's biggest worry, and I'm glad it's settled. The usual January list. Flashlights, batteries, a full tank in the pickup, the propane topped off, and the kerosene heater in the shop where we can find it. What we're not doing: buying a year's worth of canned goods, moving to the woods, or worrying. Eric's doing a little worrying. That's what sons are for. Some people have written to ask if I think the Year 2000 problem is a joke. It isn't. There are real computers out there that needed fixing, and a lot of people have worked very hard fixing them. It's just that most of the things on a dairy farm don't count years. They count mornings. |
