Y2K Fanatics. You’ve all seen them, heard them and read about them. They’re nothing new. There have always been doomsday fanatics. In olden days, whenever there was a solar eclipse, two-headed calf, or even a strange configuration of slug tracks, you can bet there was some wacko running around in true Chicken Little fashion screaming, "the sky is falling." But at least you can cut those guys a break due to the ignorance factor — it’s hard to get a larger picture of the world you live in when you rarely go more than a few miles from the place you were born. They thought the earth was flat, for chrissakes.

Anyone living in a society like ours where you are bombarded with information 24/7, however, has no excuse. As far as I know, the world hasn’t come to a screeching halt any other time that these weirdos have deigned to inform us that ‘the end is near.’ Last time I looked out my window, there wasn’t a single flood, fire, or famine for as far as the eye could see.

So what’s the big frigging deal with the millennium? It’s an arbitrary number designation somebody pulled out of their ass a few centuries ago to mark time. I know, I know, it’s supposed to count time forward from the birth of Christ and there’s the Apocalypse in the Bible and all to scare the beejeebers out of us. But not even all the scholars agree about the time that Christ as actually born, birth records being a bit scant at the time. Now, don’t get me wrong, if I happen to see Death, Pestilence, and/or War ride by, I’ll be saying ‘Hail Marys’ with the rest of you poor sods. But until then, I’m more interested in how I can make this whole ‘end of the world’ thing work for me.

The nearest I can figure it, the best way to do so is to talk some crazy goon of a Y2K fanatic into giving me his stuff. I mean, he’s not going to need it, is he? ‘You can’t take it with you’ and all that, right? If these geeks truly believe that the world is going to end, they won’t need all those microwaves, DVD players, and big screen TVs weighing down their survival packs, right? According to them, the damn things aren’t going to work anyway, so where’s the harm in their giving them to me? It’s not like I’m asking them for their manual can openers or the keys to their Y2K shelters. I just feel like I’m entitled to a little bit of recompense for all the craziness they’ve been spouting and which has been polluting up my airwaves. I’ll gladly hang onto their stuff until they want it back or the world ends. They just have to find me in my new beach house I acquired in a swap for a couple dozen cases of Dinty Moore Beef Stew and a hacksaw.

So, the next time you see some freak-azoid foaming at the mouth on a street corner spouting doomsday drivel, march right up there and offer to help them out. Tell them how glad you are that they’re there to enlighten you and that you admire their conviction to follow what they believe. When they’ve told you all about the end in gruesome, gory details, that’s when you offer to take that useless laptop off their hands upon which they’ve written their manifesto and sweeten the deal with a case of Perrier. (Even Y2K fanatics can appreciate the finer things in life.)