Largely derided as a "pollo loco livin' la vida loca," Chicken Little was actually a typical genius - wild-eyed, driven, maniacal and 50 years ahead of her time. In fact, I hear that little chick has an agent now and is trying to get on CNN to say, "I told you so!"

What Chicken Little knew was that, come the millenium, the sky will fall. Or at least big jumbo jets will be dropping out of it as their altimeters and computers point them in the general direction of the ground because of fatally flawed microchips.

What a day it will be on January 1 of two-triple-aught -- or the year 2000 to those of you without dictionaries. (An interesting side note here: While writing this article in Microsoft Word 97, my auto spell checker approved the word "microchip" but rejected the word "aught," which means zero and which has been around since, well at least the year aught. So it seems that the same programmer types who didn't allow for four aughts in their code were involved in programming my Word dictionary and left out all mention of aught, which they oughtn't have done. By the way, "oughtn't" is in the Word dictionary. What's more, the Netscape browser will correctly show the remaining days until the year 3000 in the applet above. However, Microsoft's IE browser and AOL's IE browser fail the Y3K test, coming up about 974 years short in their calculations on the index page. Thus I go on record with the first confirmed Year 3000 bug!)

The Y2K problem, of course, is that the software and hardware that runs just about everything in our lives, from toasters to tape decks, has flaws in them that prevents these stupid machines from telling the year 2000 apart from the year 1900 or any other year that ends in two zeros. The excuse given by the sorry little zit-faced programmers who created this debacle is that they needed to "save space" in the software and hardware microchips. It was either give up the four-digit dating scheme or leave out all the clever little features they put in, such as tropical fish screen savers and those wonderful error messages, such as "File not found" and "Can't execute the config.sys; error loading autoexec.bat," and my favorite, "Command invalid: Abort? Retry? Ignore?"

What all this means is that if you happen to be in an airplane or elevator or anything high in the sky at 12:01 a.m. on January 1, 2000, you might be in for a major and rapid letdown. According to research I conducted last year at Hooters in Jacksonville, Fla., dozens of planes and elevators will crash to the ground, and thousands of people will be stranded for days on escalators. I believe the results of this research are scientifically valid, since the patrons and waitresses at Hooters spend a great deal of time considering the effects of gravity on things like food trays, beer bottles and hooters, all of which can come crashing down without warning.

In addition to the obvious problem of 747s plummeting into the earth, countless other things will be affected (i.e. break) when the clock strikes "I-don't-know-what-day-this-is." For example, anyone who has any kind of account number anywhere in the world could see it vanish, along with whatever data was tied to it.

This would mean that bank accounts, insurance policies, social security, credit cards, frequent flyer points, stocks and bonds, and subscriptions to Martha Stewart Living could all evaporate. And lots of gadgets like VCRs, cars, traffic signals, iron lung machines and Interactive Barney dolls might all go kaput. (By the way, "kaput" is a valid entry in my Word dictionary, as is "cyberspace," but "altair" is not. Altair is not only a bright double star in the constellation Aquila (also not in the MS dictionary), but was the name of the very first personal computer, something you'd think Microsoft would have known.)

Anyhoo, as I explained the whole bug-in-the-chip problem to my Hooters waitress Betty Mae, she pondered a moment and then said, "Why don't they just change the clocks?"

Brilliant! Change the clocks! Why hadn't anyone thought of this before! Not just any clocks, of course. But our clocks. People's clocks. Think about it.

Why, after all, should society become hobbled by a problem that was created by humans and stems from another creation of humans? It's like we're giving ourselves the double-whammy. Time is absolutely an invention of Man - it does not exist for plants, animals, rocks or department of motor vehicle employees.

Animals have no time, or even any sense of it. Does your cat ever say, "I'm going outside for a half hour or so?" Every day when you leave for work, your dog hasn't the foggiest clue if or when you'll be back. When you do come home, he jumps all over you because he has no concept of how long you've been gone, but to him it's been at least a thousand years. And don't even get me started on plants. My azalea couldn't care less about time, and if I dropped dead in front of it I'm sure it would be at least three years before it noticed.

But man has this hang up with time. We made it, and by jingies we're going to use it! When time got too long for us to remember it in our heads, we made the calendar. We had a pretty good one that the Egyptians gave us, then Pope Gregory brought out the new and improved version. It's very useful to us (at least to employers, because about the only way most of them can tell if employees are doing their jobs is if they show up when the calendar says they're supposed to.) The calendar is good for other things, too. If there were no calendars, there would be no anniversaries or birthdays for husbands to forget, and wives would have to find other things to whine about. You wouldn't know when you were due for that raise you didn't get, and the NBA wouldn't know when to take their two weeks off between seasons.

Still, we created the calendar and we've built our lives around it. This is a learned behavior - babies don't know Saturday from 1967 until they are taught it. So why can't we teach ourselves a different calendar?

The logic goes like this: We have a calendar that everything revolves around. We know the difference between 1967 and 1997, because we still peed in our pants in 1967 and we rarely do in 1997, except when we're driving through a bumpy construction zone on the interstate after six cups of coffee. We have machines that tie in to this calendar. These machines do not pee in their pants, but they will crap out in the year 2000. We can't tell the machines to hold it, but we can tell ourselves that if something says one thing, it's really something else (this is the essence of time share condominiums.) We are smarter than machines (okay, use your imagination here).

So why not tell all our machines that it's really 1967. Most of them will be perfectly happy and won't even ask why. Then we tell ourselves to add 30 years to everything that comes out of a machine. (For those who can't add 30 to anything, we can print little cards with charts to hang around their necks. If they can't read charts, they're probably the kind of people who still wet their pants so this doesn't matter.)

There are undoubtedly a few minor details to work out in this plan, but that's for the engineers to hammer out. My solution gives us at least 30 years to fix the problems in these machines, after which it will be time to buy new machines anyway. But, hey, no planes will fall out of the sky and no one will get stuck on an escalator and starve to death before help arrives. Believe me, I've been there and it's no picnic.

If Peter Bohush thought he'd live to see the year 2000, he would have taken better care of himself.
Send your Y2K memories to him.