Take your money out of the mattress, stop stockpiling canned goods and please, leave law enforcement to the professionals. Despite what you hear on television, the world will not end on New Year's Eve, and the dreaded Y2K bug will be little more than an inconvenience.

Promoted more than an NBC miniseries about killer bees bringing a nuclear bomb to New York City on a hijacked plane, Y2K theories have put people in a panic. Apparently, this glitch which causes computers to see the year 2000 as the year 1900 represents the possible end of mankind. Luckily, Y2K will be the biggest massively hyped disappointment of all time that doesn't star Jar Jar Binks, and this vaunted global disaster will fizzle like Ginger Spice's solo career. Your lights might blink, your ATM may have momentary problems, and your home computer solitaire program might think you're playing in 1900, but for the most part, life will continue as usual.

That means no massive panic, no hysteria in the streets and rioting only in cities which have either just won a sports championship or if it's Tuesday, are Los Angeles. So you can forget your plans to live out the rest of your life bunkered in the basement subsisting on tomato soup, and I'd reconsider spending the month of November running up credit card debt.

Of course, there is no shortage of companies that have sought to cash in on the uninformed panic of their fellow man. Rather than explaining the science behind the problem, these unscrupulous fear mongers have decided to profit from that fear by selling a bunch of unnecessary crap. New products aimed at fixing Y2K problems and technologically out-of-date items touted as "Y2K safe" have flooded the market. Some, like the various software patches that fix date stamp problems in older computers, actually make sense. Others merely seek to scare people into buying things that, while they may be "Y2K safe," would be of little value if disaster actually struck.

One company has started pushing its typewriters as a must-have for businesses needing to type addresses onto envelopes post-Armageddon. It seems that while the global economy collapses, plunging the world into hopeless chaos, things will be hunky-dory at the post office. Never mind the angry masses rioting outside your window, make sure you have that direct mailing ready to send.

This nonsense has also been repeated by a company using Y2K misinformation to get people to take their money out of "dangerous" banks and put it into easy-to-hide gold. This assumes that while all traditional currency would become worthless and the stock market would collapse, people would still readily accept precious metals.

Sadly, the need for jewelry, should disaster strike, would pale in comparison to the demand for Spam, cans of beans, or any other edible substance not requiring refrigeration. Taking your money out of traditional investments and hiding gold bars in the closet would do little more than let you have a visual representation of how your wealth has disappeared.