I worked my butt off in the couple years leading up to it… patching hundreds of small business and personal PCs as well as running down custom built software that had it built in. We made it a nothing burger through hard work and diligence, finding the hidden time bombs.
I got called by a used car dealer who tried a test by setting his computer to January 3, 2000, and found his software that printed all the sales contracts AND did all the registration for the DMV for selling a car claimed the car was being sold and registered on 01/03/1900! The software put that bogus date in every place on the contracts, registration, bill of sale, etc… and there’s a mandatory FINE assessed by DMV for every single error on those documents, regardless of why they were made, including typos. It calculated payment dates and payoffs, etc., using dates for the early 20th century, and screwed up the leap year for 2000 (2000 didn’t have a leap day, while 1900 did) throwing off another issue of every car being sold one day earlier than it actually was sold, creating the appearance of fraud. Since the publisher was long gone and no updates were available, he and all the other dealers who used that software were going to have to buy and learn to use new software on very short notice. Many after they discovered the problem after the new year and they could not legally transfer the cars they sold without incurring huge fines or requiring their customers to laboriously go through every single page of the error laden printed papers, and initial every single corrected date change from 1900 to 2000! And still run the risk of having the State DMV reject the entire package which is supposed to have no corrections or deletions!
I was able to patch his software as he did not want to shell out $16 grand for a new used car software package. I found the code and fixed his package, and then i was able to offer the fix to quite a few other dealers who used the same package once i showed them what was going to hit them! I made a tidy sum on that…
"...The software put that bogus date in every place on the contracts, registration, bill of sale, etc… and there’s a mandatory FINE assessed by DMV for every single error on those documents, regardless of why they were made, including typos..."
I guarantee-GUARANTEE-that if the DMV made some error that exposed the Social Security Number or Credit Card data on a million people, not one damn swinging dick would even get a slap on the wrist.
I work in healthcare, and have seen this dynamic with my own eyes. Laws for THEE but not for ME. Boy, does that piss me off.
Because if something like that happened, you KNOW they would fine anyone down to the last cent in their coffers.
That is why many Federal/State/Local governing agencies and those who are employed by them are regarded as bottom-feeding scum by normal hard working people.