As is traditional at 12.00, we have to come clean and say that the following post was published for April Fool’s day. Sorry…

There is a worrying correlation between the number of IT projects in the world, and the number of IT project overruns. In fact, a Whitehall report shows that  UK public IT projects were, in total, 86 years overdue and £2bn over budget! That’s bad news for the exchequer, but it seems like there’s worse to come. It turns out that the Millennium Bug has been subject to project overruns that have delayed its delivery by at least twelve years. Ominously, this would bring delivery of The Bug into line with ancient Mayan prophesies predicting the end of the world in 2012.

At the turn of the Millennium, the world was dominated by three things: the fear of not getting invited to a good New Year’s Eve party, a building resentment of the Prince song ‘1999’ and a whipped up hysteria that aircraft were going to fall from the sky. On 1 January 2000, the world witnessed a complete absence of exploding power stations – and more than a few red faces in the media. The media backlash against the preceding media hysteria was as vicious as it was hypocritical. But it now seems that we might all have been a little too quick to jump on the media-bashing band wagon.

Sources in the development world are hinting that the Millennium Bug was not beaten at the turn of the Millennium, but has instead been suffering from a string of embarrassing set backs. A combination of under-staffing, unexpected sick leave and communication problems between senior and upper-middle management have set the Millennium Bug back by about twelve years. The new project delivery date of 21 December 2012 is both embarrassing to the Millennium Bug, and potentially catastrophic to the future of humanity.

Daily occurrences in 2012 could include planes falling from the sky, power outages and the infrequent failure of a weather centre in Aberdeen. However, it’s not all bad news. The government’s crisis response committee, COBRA, are investigating plans for re-branding the Millennium Bug with the help of a Guildford-based marketing consultancy. This could delay delivery of The Bug indefinitely, and at the very least would protect airliners until 2060.