f you didn't already
know it, Joe Massucci, a communication consultant for Amoco's Information Technology group, is also a published novelist of technothrillers. And guess what his latest book is about? Project Millennium.
Well, maybe not exactly about our Project Millennium. I doubt that any of us are major characters in Joe's story or that project meetings and certifying applications and components are woven into the pulsating
plot. But, The Millennium Project, now at your local bookseller, is about the oh-so-familiar Millennium Bug.
In fact, though, it was the early rumblings of Amoco's Year 2000 Millennium team back in early
1997 that planted the story idea in Joe's mind. While Joe was given the responsibility to develop a communication plan for Amoco's Year 2000 project late in 1996, in his avocational life, he had started another
novel, after completing his first published success,
CODE:ALPHA. It was about space shuttles and
asteroids and such. But it didn't fly with his editor, who thought the story veered too much toward science fiction and not enough toward the technothriller genre.
As Joe worked on the Year 2000
communication plan and sat in meetings with Amoco's Joe Kramer, he began to understand the seriousness of the Y2K issue and learned about potential scenarios that illustrated how vulnerable the nation's computing
infrastructure was to the Millennium Bug. Joe envisioned what an interesting backdrop for a technothriller story the Y2K problem could be.
Joe wrote up a several-page synopsis of his story idea and
proposed it to his editor. Well, the consensus from his editor's office back in 1997 was that the idea was too far-fetched. Only one person in the office had heard about the Millennium Bug,
and he maintained that it was no big deal.
As fate would have it, Joe's story proposal about the Millennium Bug wasn't going to be easily exterminated. Surprisingly soon after Joe's editor turned down the idea,
Newsweek hit the stands with a cover that shouted, "The Day the World Crashes." The Day it referred to was none other than January 1, 2000. Joe sent the magazine to his editor
and, suddenly, he had a contract with his publisher to write The Millennium Project, a contract that doubled his previous advance.
Tick. Tick. Tick. That's when art started to imitate life for Joe
and the ticking of the clock became very noticeable. Countdown to the year 2000 for the Project Millennium team and its counterparts; countdown to the end of 1998 for novelist
Joseph Massucci and his publisher. By the time Newsweek indirectly helped to clinch a deal and Joe was ready to devote himself to the novel, it was July 1997. The publisher asked for
a manuscript by year-end. In contrast, Joe had worked over a luxurious five-year period to complete Code: Alpha.
But, of course, The Millennium Project needed to be on the
shelves well before January 1, 2000. Working diligently under the hovering time pressure, Joe completed the manuscript in March of 1998; the publisher edited, typeset, printed, bound,
and shipped the book, all 70,000 copies, by November 1998. Bravo! That's 100% on The Millennium Project's progress index.
Joe credits much of his success with the book to his
experiences in the IT group at Amoco. In the book's Acknowledgments, he writes, "Thanks to Bill Kelly and Joe Kramer for their support and counsel on Year 2000 issues,
and for an appreciation of the daunting remediation challenges."
