Sir: As a culture, we are dangerously shortsighted. We make no plans for the long term. We just waltz along, or sometimes Charleston along, whistling a carefree tune and trusting that the future will take care of itself. That is what our forefathers did before us, and look what happened. It is therefore the duty of every forward-looking citizen to point out looming catastrophes that will come crashing down on our descendants. Otherwise our civilization will march off every cliff and tumble into every crevasse.

This is why I am writing to you today: to point out that we are leaving a mess that will cause headaches and possibly indigestion and scalp itch for our children’s children. I am speaking, of course, of the matter of dates. In every way we use dates as one of the principal organizing principles of our affairs. Databases are sorted by date. Birth dates are the form of identification universally required in the health-care industry. Yet no one seems to have taken into account the fact, which one would have thought was obvious to a six-year-old, that, in only 7,975 years, the year will have five digits.

Fortunately, it is not too late. We have a little less than eight millennia to address the Y10K problem, but if we start early and put our backs into it we should be able to get the work done in time. We need to begin at once, however, because it is a titanic task. Every database on the planet must be migrated to a new system that has space for six digits. I say six because it is obvious that, if we added only one more digit, we would merely be buying ourselves a temporary reprieve.

Of course there will be pedantic types who will point out that, in 997,975 years, the year will have seven digits. But I think it is silly to worry about problems so far in the future, and we can dismiss those pedants as the cranks they are. —Sincerely, Dr. Marcus Wudge, Ph.D., Executive Director, Int’l Ass’n of Pedantic Cranks.