October 11, 1998

The Town Crier for the Year 2000

By BARNABY J. FEDER

RAMPTON, Ontario -- Peter de Jager enjoys kidding about his unlikely emergence as the Paul Revere for the year-2000 computer crisis.

"I'm not very good on dates," de Jager says with a laugh, explaining how he cannot recall when he bought his aging Ford Explorer or how long he has lived in his modest split-level home in this Toronto suburb. "Antoinette," he calls to his wife. "When did we move here?"

	Marissa Roth for the New York Times
	Peter de Jager, a former programmer from the Toronto area, is widely regarded as having been pivotal in giving a warning to the computer world.

It has been a long time, however, since de Jager, a former computer programmer, has joked about how computers handle dates. His voice was not the first to warn that the world was sitting on a computer time bomb that could explode at the dawn of 2000. But it was an essay he wrote five years ago titled "Doomsday 2000" for Computerworld, a trade magazine, that is widely regarded as the information-age equivalent of the midnight ride of Paul Revere: the alarm that stirred the industry into taking the year-2000 menace seriously.

"We and our computers were supposed to make life easier; this was our promise," de Jager wrote. "What we have delivered is a catastrophe."

The problem, of course, is that many computers and software programs recognize years by only their last two digits -- and, with the shift of centuries, they may identify "00" as 1900 or not recognize it at all. The resulting miscalculations and malfunctions could disrupt banking, telephones and virtually any other service industry.

Since then, de Jager has become something of a folk hero in his crusade to publicize the problem. He figures that he averages more than five interviews a day, and his goal this year was to cut back his commitments so he could at least be home on weekends.

"It's lonely on the road," said de Jager, the father of two teen-age sons. He said he could not shake his regret at missing the funerals of his brother in 1996 and his father this year. "I'm as close to burnout as you can get without seeing charred edges," he said.

There are benefits, of course.

De Jager, who is 43, earned a six-figure income last year for the first time. Having bumped his standard speaking fee to $7,000 from $4,000, he stands to do even better this year.

De Jager, who had moved up from his programming duties to jobs in systems management and giving speeches on managing technology before encountering year-2000 fame, acknowledges that his new status also has its rewards.

He has lectured the world's central bankers in Basel, Switzerland, on the perils of inaction; rubbed shoulders with powerful chief executives at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and gained access to leading politicians in Washington and other capitals. His name is on the stock index of software companies that make much of their money from year-2000 business, and his three-year-old Web site is a focal point of news and discussion about the problem.

"It's an adventure I'll be able to talk to my grandchildren about," he said.

And yet, in an age when getting rich -- the faster the better -- seems to be the operating principle in most businesses, de Jager is leading the modest life style of someone who expects celebrity to be fleeting. His nondescript three-bedroom ranch home, chosen for its proximity to the Toronto airport, sits deep in a crowded subdivision. He bought a similar house across the street to use as an office.

The de Jagers recently purchased a vacation getaway, too -- not a beachfront mansion in Miami, but rather a 77-acre farm that is a 45-minute drive from home.

De Jager is no longer surprised by insinuations that he is trying to cash in on his fame, but he continues to be upset by them.

"I don't own a single share of any year-2000 stock," he said, referring to software and consulting companies that deal with the problem. "In seven years of speaking, I've never mentioned a vendor from the stage, and I could easily have made a million dollars by endorsing something."

A large, bearded man who seems to draw energy from a podium, de Jager made public speaking a full-time job in 1993 after discovering a talent for boiling things down to simple metaphors and pithy pronouncements.

"He's a contrarian by nature, and he's garrulous," said Dennis Eskow, a journalist in 1989 when he met de Jager, then the head of information technology at a Canadian clothing company. "With a slightly different sensibility, he could be a stand-up comic."

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Lately, de Jager has been annoying many former allies by chastising audiences for moving "straight from denial to defeatism." He has been predicting that the year-2000 bug will turn out to be disruptive but not necessarily disastrous. Businesses and governments can avert an electronic Armageddon, he preaches, if they will press ahead with efforts to upgrade computers and figure out contingency plans. Sometimes you can get by with "steppingstones instead of a bridge," he has been saying.

De Jager was born in South Africa, but his family moved among that country, his mother's native Ireland and Canada before settling in Canada in 1971. All that "made me someone very cognizant of change and what goes into problem-solving," he said.

So how does de Jager plan to spend New Year's Eve 1999?

He has received a stream of invitations to events large and small that would either celebrate the industry's victory over the year-2000 threat or wallow in its defeat. But he says he intends to be sitting with his family at O'Connor's, a popular pub for Irish musicians in Doolin, County Clare, where his mother lives, slaking his thirst and playing the bodhran, a goatskin drum.

"I'm not very musical, but I can keep time," he said.

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