Dan Lee, a soft-spoken former Wall Street analyst and weekend pilot, isn't generally given to flights of fancy.
But he's had it with the so-called millennium bug.Last month, Mr. Lee, the chief financial officer of Mirage Resorts Inc. in Las Vegas, got a two-page query from Harrah's Entertainment Inc., in Memphis, Tenn., asking whether Mirage's computers are ready for the new millennium. "Who is leading your Y2K efforts?" Harrah's asked Mr. Lee, requesting titles, names and phone numbers.
Such letters are common now as companies rush to ensure that their computers will be able to cope when the date rolls from 1999 to 2000. Hoping to avoid breakdowns and legal liability for year 2000 problems, they are seeking blanket assurances from people they do business with that they, too, are millennium-prepared.
Mr. Lee scrawled in reply, "There are large rodents on the property who are in charge of our ... Y2K efforts. I'm not sure of their phone and fax numbers."
Asked for the names of his suppliers, he listed "God" and gave "Heaven" as the address. Then, in the margins, he scribbled further remarks to Colin Reed, Harrah's chief financial officer: "This is the best proof I've seen yet that the Y2K situation is a ... scheme initiated by Bill Gates, et al., to sell software."
The questionnaire he mocked specifically pertained to the computer readiness of an Atlantic City parking lot that Harrah's rents from Mirage Resorts. The lot is very low-tech. "I'm not even sure that it's paved," says the 42-year-old Mr. Lee.
So, asked by Harrah's to describe how he has tested the parking lot's systems, he responded: "We took an old Ford pickup truck and removed the clock. We then drove the Ford to the site and parked it, being careful to avoid the rodents mentioned above. It drove fine. It parked fine. We are seeking an expensive consultant who will verify, based on this data, that our parking lot is Y2K compliant."
Mr. Lee's year 2000 problem is overkill: He has been deluged all year with letters and questionnaires overreacting, in his opinion, to predictions of computer havoc. "This year 2000 stuff is waayyyy overdone," he says. "It's complete, complete lunacy."
Not all of his colleagues have reacted quite so strongly, though many say they are searching for solutions to the paperwork glut. Glenn Schaeffer, president and chief financial officer of Circus Circus Enterprises Inc., another Las Vegas gambling company, says his staff has been swamped with form letters for the past six months or so. "The anxiety level as we get closer to the date is getting higher," he says. Mr. Schaeffer sends a form-letter response to the form-letter requests.
The madness started in earnest last spring, Mr. Lee says, when federal banking regulators asked financial institutions to make sure their borrowers are prepared. The banks in return requested details of Mirage Resorts' computer progress. "I have 40 banks," says Mr. Lee. "I got forms from each asking if we are Y2K compliant and if we've asked all our suppliers if they're Y2K compliant."
A trickle became a torrent. He got forms from suppliers who sell beer to Mirage Resorts' casinos -- the Golden Nugget, Treasure Island, the Mirage and Bellagio. He got forms from credit-card processors at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co., from trade-show operators and from tour operators. He got queries about his elevators and his air-conditioning systems.
To Mr. Lee's dismay, even his own staff succumbed to the urge to blanket suppliers with form letters. One day he discovered his staff had created a special subteam assigned to the paperwork-handling. He put a stop to that. "I said, I'll handle the paperwork, you work on the computers," he says.
He took to tossing out many of the forms that came in. But he couldn't ignore a 22-page epistle from the Securities and Exchange Commission instructing him on how to report his Y2K progress in federal filings. "They want charts and graphs and diagrams," Mr. Lee says.
But when Harrah's asked how he is communicating his computer progress to customers, Mr. Lee blasted back, "How many people do you want me to fax this to? Do I have to repeat this exercise monthly? As an aside, how many trees and how many man-years are being wasted by Y2K paperwork?"
Mr. Reed, the executive at Harrah's who received Mr. Lee's response, got the idea. He was heard to mumble: "This is a lot to ponder."
Mr. Lee, who before he got into the gambling business was one of the first on Wall Street to analyze the casino industry back in the 1980s, started out being polite. But in his response to banks last May, he asked for a modicum of common sense: "Our dealers do not need computers to deal cards."
And he suggested a potential bright side to computer havoc. Federal air-traffic-control computers could fail. Then the Federal Aviation Administration would be forced to ground planes in Las Vegas. "This would, of course, occur on Jan. 1, 2000, when most of our best customers will, we hope, be recovering from the New Year's party of the century," Mr. Lee told his bankers. "Then they will be trapped here. ..." Not a bad thing in his estimation.
Despite his contempt for Y2K folderol, Mr. Lee actually has been doing his bit for the turn of the millennium. The PC on his desk has been operating in the year 2000, without a glitch, since he set its calendar ahead months ago as a test. Mirage Resorts installed a new hotel-reservation system and has signed a $2.1 million consulting contract to make sure its gambler-tracking systems are ready. In the end, Mr. Lee expects Mirage to have spent about $30 million on preparedness.
"We're being very diligent about everything in all this except the damned paperwork," he says, "because I'm sick of it."