Metaphors

photo: thestar.com/news

The half-sunken cruise ship Costa Concordia still lies where she ran aground just a few hundred yards offshore of the island of Giglio in Giglio Porto, Italy.   By now, anyone who reads, listens to, or watches the news is familiar with the almost unbelievable story. 

How could so many things go wrong? The most compelling questions are yet to be answered.    My friend has a 17 foot fisherman's boat and he has a sonar screen that scans the bottom for solid objects, but a cruise ship the size of the Empire State Building has no working sonar?  Also, just about everyone who has been interviewed by news reporters has complained about the lack of  training and information following the abandon ship order, yet nearly 4,200 passengers and crew got off the ship alive in the dark of night.  Isn't the most incredible fact that less than 40 people are still confirmed dead or missing in the bowels of the behemoth? 

It boggles the mind to consider that such a disaster could happen in calm seas in well traveled waters.

But it reminds us that the bubble of safety and security that we take for granted can pop at any time.

For some reason, ship disasters always make me think about my working life.  Many of the projects I worked on were like cruises to nowhere, plotted by some captain of industry who had an enormous ego, but was navigationally retarded.   The Titanic metaphor often seemed apt.  We trench denizens would sit around the coffee room musing about management re-arranging the deck chairs when the ship was taking on water, or arguing about what song selections the band should play while passengers took to the lifeboats. 

Some of those projects ended-up on the shoals of  disaster.  As I review my resume,  most of my former companies have failed or merged into different organizations.  Some cheap-shot commenters will undoubtedly muse that I was the jinx that helped sink those ships.  But, as is my wont, I prefer to point the finger at cowardly captains and clueless coworkers. 

Looking Forward to Another Fearful Decade

So here we are, witnessing the last few dessicated days of this decade drop one-by-one like leaves swirling into the storm drain of history.

One cannot help but compare our current media-stoked fears of melting ice caps and rising sea levels to the sense of trepidation (and in some cases - panic) that characterized the waning moments of the last decade.

Y2K
If you were working in IT and you were working for a company that had been around for more than five years, you were in some way involved with the desperate race to convert your legacy COBOL based Mainframe scatter-base business systems to the infinitely more complicated world of Client-Server, enterprise-wide, shared database environments. Nearly everyone was convinced that because some computer programs carried only the last two digits of the year, this would cause the entire infrastructure to a halt. Planes would fall out of the sky, elevators would get stuck between floors, automobiles wouldn't start.

It seems kind of silly now; nothing bad happened when the century did finally roll. Yet the fear that was generated by gurus and pundits caused businesses to spend trillions of dollars changing their perfectly adequate systems. Do you think the lack of reported disasters was the justification for all the remedial activity? Was there a monetary incentive for software companies and consultants to promote the fear of doing nothing?

Deja Vu?
One cannot help but see a similarity in the current Global Warming controversy. I say controversy because not everyone agrees that humans are substantially affecting climate change. Heck legitimate scientists even disagree on whether the temps are warming or cooling. But, which ever side you are on, you cannot help noticing that the dire warnings echo the fearmongering of the Y2K crisis. Most of us non-scientists find it easier to go with the consensus opinion. But we should remember that historically, consensus in scientific thought has generally been proven incorrect by the accumulation of more information. The data upon which the current global warming fears are based cannot be verified. Not very scientific, if you ask me. Again, we can see a monetary gain for industries that will benefit from selling green stuff. I am not suggesting that our energy policy is for sale. That would be cynical.

Y2K was not the only impending disaster of the millennium. Ten years ago, we were worried that the cloning of a sheep named Dolly would lead to Frankenstinian experiments and armies of warrior human clones, body part farming and a global market in spare body parts. No one wanted to eat genetically engineered corn, nor even steaks from cows that had been fed such scary food. Remember the Mad Cow disease panic? It ruined the US beef export market for years.

In 1999 we were worried about the war in Kosovo, we worried about the flare-up between nuclear powers India vs Pakistan. We worried that the Columbine massacre would spark more copycat mass shooters among Gen-Y malcontents. We were worried about WMD's in Saddam Hussein's arsenal. Most of these fears fizzled early in the new decade.

What Really Happened.
Who among us anticipated the debacle of the 2000 presidential election? The world watched while we learned about hanging chads in a ballot count dispute that raised the spectre of third-world style election fraud in Florida and other states. And, we were shocked and awed by the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington DC. This was followed by paralyzing terror in the form of Anthrax in the mail, and sniper attacks in DC/Virginia area. The war on terror drew into a long and costly occupation which has yet to end. Images of Katrina victims stranded on roofs in New Orleans compete with pictures of hundreds of homes destroyed by fires in LA. Oh, I almost forgot the near total collapse of the economy that virtually wiped-out half of our retirement nesteggs, sent millions of Americans to the unemployment line and worst of all - destroyed our faith in the integrity of the fat cats and politicians who run and oversee the system.

The summary point here: just about everything we were worried about in 1999 turned out OK and the real disasters were unforseen. Let us assume that the next decade will bring more surprises - that is indeed scary.

Have a predictable New Year!