WALLDORF, Germany — Despite fears the world over that the year 2000 is a ticking time bomb, there is no survivalist run on generators or stockpiling of canned food in the bastion of engineering excellence that is modern Germany.
In fact, the only visible signs of the so-called millennium bug are the burgeoning sales revenues of high-tech industries selling Y2K solutions.
Germans view Y2K as an overrated "technical problem." And with the nearly problem-free launch of a common currency comfortably behind them, Germans argue that this year's much more daunting conversion of European society to the new euro currency proves they can handle a simple turn of a computerized calendar page.
"The euro affected everything. I think people in America don't realize what a huge change this was for us. All of a sudden, we had this big new marketplace where 11 separatecountries used to be, affecting business, taxes, transport, borders--everything changed overnight," says Michael Klemen, director of European sales marketing for SAP, the world's leading business-management software provider, which has transformed the erstwhile wheat fields of this town near Heidelberg into Germany's answer to Silicon Valley.
Klemen, like others in the low-profile army of German Y2K trouble-shooters, insists this country is being unjustly marked down on millennium readiness because the analysts have mistaken the euro conversion for a distraction when it really was a dry run.
But the warnings emanating from global consulting firms such as GartnerGroup and Cap Gemini that Germany is woefully behind in the worldwide effort to avert a Jan. 1, 2000, catastrophe raise the question of whether Germany is not just calm but complacent.
Britain, France and Italy--the other European members of the Group of 7 industrialized nations--also have been rated as wanting in readiness for the rash of computer breakdowns that might occur when systems designed to read the year as two digits misinterpret the change as 1999 to 1900.
French officials have jokingly expressed as much concern about the adequacy of champagne supplies for the New Year as for high-tech preparedness. Britain's more visible activity on Y2K concerns can probably be attributed to its having opted out of the European Monetary Union--and with it, the experience of weathering a major conversion.
