By SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
Lifestyle Columnist

From news services: Air traffic controllers across New Zealand, unable to communicate with each other as a result of a computer glitch, scramble to locate scores of flights.

A backup system is activated; no mishaps are reported.

And this: Americans receiving parcels from Germany are advised to handle them cautiously and call police if packages are unexpected. A heretofore faithful Internet server refuses to function. Suggests check password or modem configuration. Nothing has changed — it's just not working.

I step on the bathroom scales, a habit that usually starts my day off depressed. But this time the message is neither bad nor good. The little window with its mocking numbers never lights up, but remains stone cold non-judgmental black. The phone rings. No one's there. The furnace does not come on and the house is cold. Not a glitch Dave can fix. Call the service guy, who can't come for several days. At Kroger, my credit card declines to scan. I begin to worry. No plastic money? This is a glitch Dave can fix, with the old-fashioned green kind.

In the middle of one of our favorite Beethoven piano concertos, the car radio goes silent. We jiggle knobs; it comes back on. Off. Back on. Then off for good — until Lois Reitzes apologizes that WABE has lost the satellite feed for Karl Haas. Doesn't matter. By this time, we're fiddling with the heater which has also gone south at the worst time of the year. A virtually new car, and the heater doesn't work? How can this be? What else will go wrong?

We look at each other. “Did you notice something odd about Old Grunt last night?” Dave asks. Old Grunt is his mother's grandfather clock, so named because it complains bitterly about any kind of change. Daylight Saving Time wasn't Grunt's idea and he resents the twice-annual adjustments. Behind the pure Westminster chimes, if you listen closely, you can hear him grunting and groaning as his elderly gears strain to tell an hour he doesn't believe in.

“I couldn't sleep,” Dave continues, “and I noticed that at midnight, Grunt didn't strike at all. Did the chimes, but not the strike. And at 12:30 he struck 11. At 1 a.m., he was back in synch again.” “Nonsense,” I shake my head. “You know how that clock works. Each set of chimes and strikes has to follow in a certain order, or the whole thing is off. And he's OK today. You must have imagined it.” “Like you imagined the piano wasn't working?” he retorts.

I wince. I began to play a hymn at church, but the piano made only a little sound as though every string was heavily muffled — nothing anyone 10 feet away could possibly hear. As worshippers looked at me with puzzled expressions, I banged harder on the keyboard, to no avail. That's when I glanced down at the damper pedal and realized that this particular piano can be silenced by pushing the pedal down and to one side where it catches under the framework and mutes the works. What was happening?

“The microwave. You didn't hear it last night?” Dave asks, slowly. The microwave built into our old range succumbed to lightning several years ago. Rather than install a new one in a stove we'll replace soon, we bought a small stand-alone and set it on the counter. The old one makes a dandy cabinet for cereal and crackers. Recently it's begun making odd noises, clicks and screeches, all on its own. Dave can't fix it, but assured me there is no danger. Until that strange night when it also began flashing lights bright enough to illuminate everything in the room. Then the fan started running.

I slept through the commotion. Shaking his head in disbelief, Dave severs all electric connections to that part of the stove. What a day! Except it was NOT on a single day that all these things happened. They took place over the course of several months. But if any or all of them DO occur on Jan. 1, you know someone will blame the fact that the calendar has flipped to a new millennium.

Stuff happens. Every day. That's the only thing that worries me about the so-called “Y2K crisis,” that glitches like any of these will happen somewhere Friday night. And someone will panic and do something stupid. Stuff happens. Every day. Terrorists may seize upon our hysteria to work their mischief, but they might do that any time. (And meanwhile, darn it, our Christmas presents from Germany have not been delivered.)

As for large crowds, we plan to stay out of them anyway. Did last year and the year before that, and the year before... Listen: As imprecisely as the Western calendar was designed, and as uncertain as scholars are about the exact date of Christ's birth, there is nothing mystic at all about midnight, Jan. 1, 2000. Sure, I understand how the double-zero could cause computers to fail, but should we predict the end of the world on that date? I don't think so.

The only real Y2K bug is the one gnawing its way into the minds of misled survivalists and the superstitious. Easy for me — the co-owner of a camper with a full water tank and a generator — to say. And if my computer goes down, my guru, who assures me it will be OK, will have more to worry about than just the end of the world.

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