With the world ending on Friday, Dec. 21, most of the industry appears to have scrapped plans for the following week, leaving many projects in limbo.
The timing is particularly frustrating to some. "They've canceled our Tuesday meetings for the next two weeks. How am I gonna make FCS [first customer shipment deadline] now?" says one project manager.
Other sources seem relieved they won't have to actually complete the things they'd been talking about all year. "That 1Tbit/s stuff? That was so never gonna happen," says one optical networking engineer, laughing.
Throughout the industry, employees have been told not to come to work Monday or Tuesday, most likely because their workplaces will cease to exist after Friday's yet-undefined world-ending event.
"Pretty much everything we've done in LTE radio design has been based on the work of the early Mesoamericans, so obviously we give a lot of credence to their calendars written on stone as well," says one chip-industry spokesman.
Industry sources scoffed at the suggestion that the Mayan calendar does not end with the dawn of the 14th b'ak'tun but simply rolls over, much as the Gregorian calendar did in the year 2000.
"Yeah, someone gave me a white paper on that. It was full of numbers, so I went back to doing Facebook instead," says one CEO.
Light Reading intends to "live tweet" the end of the world Friday, unless there's something good on TV.
We'll also be getting reaction from the telecom fraternity in Islamic countries, where it is currently the year 1434. If it all goes badly elsewhere, they'll still have 578 years to build an efficient SDN network before they reach 2012 too....
— The Staff, Light Reading
