Remember the wild-eyed guy with the robe and the sandals and the long beard, charging up and down Wall Street saying the world was going to end on New Year’s Eve when the calendar rolled from 1999 to 2000? OK, he wore a three piece suit and really nice shoes, and there were hundreds of these prophets of doom, but they were still a bit wild-eyed.
Well, those guys told a really good story about how mainframe computers couldn’t be programmed to handle four-digit dates, so they would get all confused when the year “00” succeeded the year “99”, and they would freeze up and stop working. Little companies were supposed to be OK because they had little computers, but big companies would fall like giants: Banks, governments, the military, and worst of all the electric company!
Perhaps it’s just that the media loves a good scare, but they played it to the hilt, and the commercial bank who handled our business at the time really drank the Kool-Aid: “If you guys at Bantam Fuel don’t install a backup generator, we won’t renew your loan in the summer of 1999.” Really? Yeah, really.
So my father and I gritted our teeth and spent about $28,000 on two huge generators, one for the office, and one for the gas station in Litchfield (now the “Bantam Fuel Mart”). Did the power go out for three weeks on January 1st, 2000? Let’s not even go there… my teeth still hurt from the gritting.
But now and then the power does go out for a few hours, or even a whole day, and those stupid generators are very nice to have. So I wasn’t surprised to see cars lined up in the road on Monday morning to get gasoline.
Even so, I was shocked when I stepped inside. There must have been 30 people lined up like zombies for a turn at the coffee station. These people were in desperate need of a caffeine fix, and I would have called Drug Enforcement if I hadn’t been one of them.
Apparently Dunkin Donuts and the other two gas stations had no power, and the Common Ground closed a month before (which we had absolutely nothing to do with… it was a great business). Someone in line was tweeting to his friends that the Bantam Fuel Mart had hot coffee. To be “tweeted” about gave me a feeling of being important and ridiculous at the same time.
So, was the generator at the gas station a wise investment after all? Let’s see: $28,000 divided by 35 cents profit on a cup of coffee…
