Due to rising prosperity, India has announced that it is exiting the call-center business at the end of 2020 prompting fears of a Year 2021 bug.

Globalisation has ensured that almost all call centres have been outsourced to India but as they are all due to close at midnight on the 31st of December 2020, the result could be worldwide chaos.

Many of the world's largest businesses rely on Indian call-centers to confuse their customers with polite but inscrutable advice about how to bank online or return unwanted items shipped from China. The Philippines is already operating at capacity so will unable to take on the deluge of calls expected if India exits the business.

Once Indian call centres are shut down, the businesses using them will have to provide actual service and support to their customers, which almost no companies are now able to do having laid off everyone who knows anything about their products. Although customers have proven highly adept at answering their own questions if left without support for long enough.

This Year 2021 bug could be even more damaging than the Year 2000 bug when absolutely nothing happened as a result of legacy COBOL computer programs having to deal with the move into the new 4-digit millennium. Nevertheless, Y2K spawned a multi-billion dollar business opportunity as consultants ramped up their fear, uncertainty and doubt campaign.

However this time the result could be worse. An almost universal use of AI to power those annoying chatbots that function like a modern version of that daft paperclip that used to provide help (as if) in old versions of Microsoft Windows.

A company spokesperson commented:

We are not worried about a Year 2021 bug. Our customers have told us they are happy with the lack of any instruction manuals, impenetrable menu-driven help lines and long-wait times. In any case the bulk of our support is provided by customers themselves via online forums and YouTube unboxing videos so they are not worried by the lack of access to a human being to help them or the fact that without a smartphone to send a two-factor authentication token to they are screwed.