When you think about the aggravation that a broken stoplight or a stuck railroad crossing gate can bring into our daily lives, the Y2K Bug could be quite a catastrophe. Having some of the world's most sophisticated computers acting as if it's 1900 instead of 2000 would cause much bigger headaches than a traffic jam.
On the other hand, I can't help but recall Skylab. You remember 1979 when the fuss then was over a badly programmed space laboratory that scientists feared would crash to earth, but no one knew exactly where. Many people figured, with their luck, Skylab probably would fall on them. As it turned out, Skylab disintegrated harmlessly over the Indian Ocean and an unpopulated area of Australia.