Here it comes again; the same question, asked for the umpteenth time at the umpteenth press conference.
"Would you be willing to fly on Dec. 31st?"And once again, John Koskinen, head of the White House effort to crush Y2K bugs, replies that he will be flying round-trip from Washington to New York at 7 p.m. EST, the moment when 2000 arrives for pilots and air traffic controllers.
Because airlines operate on Greenwich Mean Time to avoid time-zone confusion, 2000 will begin in the aviation world when midnight strikes in Greenwich, England, five hours before the ball drops at New York's Times Square.
The usual airline schedule cutbacks on New Year's Eve have made it hard for Koskinen to schedule his promised flight. But he will, he vows.
Journalists who have followed Y2K issues for months have heard Koskinen explain his travel plans repeatedly. But as Jan. 1 draws closer, the number of reporters assigned to the story keeps growing. And at each press conference, scheduled almost daily now, a new reporter asks the old airplane question.
Koskinen answers not just with patience, but with enthusiasm. His consuming mission is to educate every American about Y2K, the software flaw that exists because many older computer programs and chips recognize only the last two digits of the year. When 2000 arrives, those computers may misinterpret "00" as 1900 and cause equipment malfunctions.
Since February 1998, Koskinen has been in charge of the President's Council on the Year 2000 Conversion. So far, the job has required him to fill two roles: scold and comforter.
On the scolding side, he has had to badger industry and government officials to take Y2K seriously. At the same time, he has had to project cool confidence about the date rollover. One poorly worded answer to a question about the soundness of the financial system, and he could trigger a run on banks.
With less than six weeks left to prepare for Y2K, Koskinen's role is changing. The time to urge people to fix computers has passed. The message today is to make contingency plans for doing jobs manually should computers fail.
But most of Koskinen's time is spent preparing the Information Coordination Center, the high-tech office two blocks from the White House where he will pull together Y2K updates and tell Americans what is happening on Dec. 31.
He seems well suited to the job, an extremely smart man with a trim, athletic body, at once relaxed and intense. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1939, he graduated magna cum laude from Duke University. A Phi Beta Kappa member, he then went to Yale Law School and did post-graduate work at Cambridge University in England.
As president of the Palmieri Co., he spent two decades overhauling financially failing corporations, including Penn Central Transportation Co. and Levitt and Sons. In the mid-1990s, he served as deputy director of the federal Office of Management and Budget.
In his current job, he is the subject of innumerable conspiracy theories, spun by people who believe the government is lying about Y2K dangers. He also is mocked by those who think Y2K amounts to media hype. But those in Congress and industry working on Y2K issues widely regard him as just the right man for the midnight moment.
Chatting recently about his personal preparations, Koskinen said he has gotten his flu shot. He added that he soon will start avoiding crowds to dodge cold viruses. In training mentally and physically for Dec. 31, Koskinen is readying to have billions of eyes from around the world look to him for answers.
Let's hope the flight attendants give him extra peanuts and two pillows on that 7 p.m. flight.