On the other hand, sometimes we need to take a good hard break to give us perspective and allow us to come back and enjoy what turned from interesting challenge to continuously having our head pushed under the water.

Damn, I had nearly forgotten and lost the memory of a pair of Datasouth Performax's thrashing their way through triplicate NCR, burning out their printheads requiring expensive repairs, ribbons becoming increasingly harder to get and more expensive, the Office Manager who decided to save money by buying aftermarket cartridges that would often jam up far far before the printing started to fade, usually at 1/3rd the life of the factory cartridges, and the fight when the owner after doing the math and figuring out the penalty was $100's of dollars, noisily objected.:mad: The clatter drove the two salespeople next to the printer room nuts, especially when it started printing content with bar codes. No, we don't miss them at all and gladly took a sledge to the last two we had in service as a cathartic therapy for the years of torture.

From a National Geographic I read decades ago, it was a cycle based on an astronomical observance. They had watched long enough to know that there was a predictable time period and added it to their calendar system. It took into consideration the earth day, lunar month, solar year, possibly the precession of the earth's axis and tried to make some sort of unified time measuring system from the observations. Saying the universe would come to an end at the final day of the 13th baktun is like saying that the world would come to an end because it's the last day of the lunar month. They're all cycles.

These ends of the world are such fun. Actually if you've saved up your money, you can get some really good bargains before, during and after the event. I bought my house cheap because of Y2k and the expectations of relatives of the owner. It was weird how people were divesting of various assets in exchange for money. Then there was an Evangelical event in my local town that had some good bargain hunting results. Though there were those who thought the rapture would free them from paying the bills, and over extended themselves much to their survival regret. Same goes for this one, despite the fact that they looked and found a page from the next month on the calendar. There are opportunities to be had from the true believer. Wasn't that axiom "A sucker and his money must be parted"?