This Contest's Candidates (the official list, in no particular order):

John Koskinen (yet again), Federal Y2k czar, when asked how the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was preparing for Y2K: "Well, we've been trying to get them to focus on this problem."
Try harder, John.  If only one agency of the Federal government is to have a plan for Y2k, one would think it should be FEMA, wouldn't one?  Quoted on Westergaard Year 2000 Federal Government is Botching Year 2000 Efforts by Jim Lord (who knows what he's talking about) September 21, 1998.

An unnamed director for a leading French bank: “The Year 2000 question is a conspiracy cooked up by the Americans and the British to create a smokescreen and distract attention away from preparations for the single European currency.”
The surest sign of a vast conspiracy is the utter lack of evidence for one. Pretty darn clever of all those COBOL programmers to have anticipated the Euro back in the 1960's and kept it secret all these years. Quoted on The Economist Countries that count September 1998. Submitted by L. Clark O'Hare.

Giorgio Leskovic, European banking services director for IDC: "In less than four months they have to be ready for monetary union, whereas with year 2000 you have another year."
And if you're behind schedule a little at the end of the year, just have the EU declare an extra one-day bank holiday on Monday, January 3, 2000 so everyone can finish up.  Quoted on Computer Weekly News Euro compliance stays top priority September 10, 1998 (requires free registration).

Thomas Oleson, research director at IDC: "Ed Yardeni warns of an 80 per cent chance of recession and yet when you look at the fact that Y2K will require only 3.4 per cent of total IT spending in the five years up to the Millennium, we have a good reason for asking him, 'where are you coming from?'"
An informed position, perhaps?  Could it be because people are only spending 3.4 percent of their IT budgets on the fix?  Quoted on VNU Newswire IDC European Forum: Y2K not global catastrophe, September 8, 1998.  Submitted by Mark A. Walker and Tom Carr (their e-mails arrived at the same time!).

Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, speaking in Vienna on Intel's Y2k preparedness : "We don't know which of our production machines are going to work."
Ok, everyone say it with me: "assessment." Perhaps there should be a new "Moore's Law" regarding business systems planning. Quoted on Reuters Intel's Moore Relaxed About Millennium, September 1, 1998.  Submitted by Michael Taylor.

Newt Gingrich, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives: "Year 2000 is total downside risk for Clinton and Gore ... If nothing goes wrong, they get no gain whatsoever. If [government computers] crash and burn, Mr. Information Superhighway has a real problem and will get a lot of heat."
Well, now there's a good reason to underfund the effort to keep the government from going toes up. Actually, there will probably be plenty of "heat" to go around. Quoted on TechWeek Gingrich’s take on Y2K August 24, 1998. Submitted by Lee McLamb.

James O. Spellman, a spokesman for the Securities Industry Association on the recent pre-test of securities trading Y2k compliance “What we honestly learned was that the year 2000 problem was really small.” The article he is quoted in goes on to point out that "The securities industry will spend between $5 billion and $6 billion through 1999 to fix the bug."
A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you're talking about "small."  Quoted on ABCNews.com Wall Street Tests Y2K August 10, 1998.  Submitted by Fred Holborn.

Oracle Corporation: "In 60 Days Oracle Can Solve a Problem That Took 2000
Years to Create"
Catchy, yet stupid.  Banner headline on their corporate website.  Submitted by Andy Maher.

Stupid Y2k Product Compliance:
An anonymous submission: I (my employer) recently purchased a RJ45 to DB25 cable from Lucent Technologies that was accompanied by a certificate affirming that "This Product is YEAR 2000 Compliant". 
Cool!  Can we get a Y2k compliant coffee cup to go with that?

An un-named guest speaker at a Dallas area Y2k preparedness forum : "Depending on your view of the situation, the fuel you have at the time of the collapse might be all you have for five years," he says, adding that whatever you do, you shouldn't buy a propane tank. "Rent it," he says. "Pay a $250, two-year down payment, and in two years they're bankrupt. And give 'em your Visa number."
And hope the propane dealer's credit card verification system takes it, of course.   We haven't gone after the inherent stupidity in some of the Y2k survivalist literature to date, but this article made for interesting and occasionally humorous reading.  Quoted on The Dallas Observer.com Bugged By The Millennium August 27, 1998. 

Check it yourself--Advice on how to test your PC for Y2k compliance found in a Florida Telco Credit Union newsletter: "Set the date on your PC to 29 February 2000. Do you get a message, 'invalid date'?  You should, as it is a leap year!"
Wait...it gets even better. Our submitter, Diane Wunderlich, called the newsletter's editor's staff to point out the mistake.  She was politely that it was not a mistake, saying "that's right, it is a leap year". Printed in The Courier: A Publication of Florida Telco Credit Union, Summer 1998, "Your Home Computer -- Will it Work in the New Millennium."  Sorry, no URL on this one, but we do have a copy of the publication on file.

Stupid Journalism Section
The reporting of the Year 2000 problem has been largely uninformed at best and downright boneheadedly stupid at worst.  Starting this month, we're going to share with you the best of the stupid reporting we've run across. 

Rob Morse, columnist for the San Francisco Examiner: "You bet. I'm going to call a $250-an-hour consultant to reset my microwave. My microwave doesn't know what year it is, and my toaster isn't run by a mainframe computer."
AND
"To me, the Y2K problem is the why-to-care problem, and not just because I'm semi-prepared for the earth to move and return us to 1906 - the heck with 1900."
More toaster concerns. Actually, it was hard to pick just two stupid statements from this column.  Quoted on the San Francisco Examiner The media in bed with millennium bug August 25, 1998.  Submitted first by Charles Cherry, but several other alert readers sent us the article as well.  Way to go Rob!

Lloyd Grove Washington Post Staff Writer: "And let's not omit the looming horror of the "Y2K Scenario" -- in which the world's myriad computer systems, which control every aspect of modern life, will crash immediately after midnight on Jan. 1, 2000, because of an unbelievably stupid foul-up by software nerds, and thus plunge the planet into an unimaginable technological apocalypse."
Yep.  Software nerds caused the problem all by themselves, with almost no help whatsoever from management and executives. Quoted on The WashingtonPost.com Is the Party Over? September 1, 1998.

Joseph Nocera, reporter for Money magazine: "Ultimately, what the Y2K alarmists discount most is human adaptability. An astonishingly resilient species, we cope with wars, huge upheavals, natural disasters of all sorts. And now we're going to be stopped in our tracks by a computer glitch? I don't think so."
Not at all.  I'm sure we'll adapt.  We can, for instance, keep warm by burning old magazines for heat if things don't get fixed because reporters convince people this isn't a real problem. Another article with lots of stupid quotes to choose from.   Quoted in Money Worried About The Year 2000 Problem? Get Real September, 1998.  Submitted by Dave Howard.

Columnist Rebecca L. Eisenberg a.k.a. "Net Skink": "Fortunately, like most computer problems, the Y2K bug can be fixed. In many cases, including the huge databases where it strikes the deepest blows, it already has been fixed by programmers who built patches and rewrote code. Unfortunately, like most computer problems, the Y2K bug's potential dangers have been exaggerated -- in this case, to science fiction proportions that humble the supercomputer HAL in Arthur C. Clarke's sci-fi classic, '2001.'"
"I'm sorry Dave.  I'm afraid I can't do that."  Quoted on The San Francisco Examiner online Year 2000 hype is relentless April 19, 1998.  Submitted by A. Lizard.

And now the the unofficial list:
all those other entries who's sources couldn't be verified, but we liked anyway

Overheard in an elevator:
"What's the big deal?  It's only computers!"
Right up there with Bill Gates' "640K ought to be enough for anybody" statement circa 1981. Submitted by Marion Orem.

An unnamed program manager of an unnamed aircraft weapons system under development by an unnamed US Air Force. When asked whether the aircraft was Y2K compliant, he responded, "The plane flies, so the software must be good."
Let's see...it didn't crash the first time we flew it so therefore that means it'll never crash.  Mark that "test" phase done!  Submission by a necessarily unnamed source.

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