Posted on 12/23/2019 9:00:15 AM PST by Textide
20 years since Y2K. Never met anyone that built a bomb shelter, but do remember the tension that night as the clocks around the world ticked over.
https://www.documentjournal.com/2019/12/y2k-20-years-later-documents-contributors-recall-the-armageddon-that-never-was/
I read that as the year 1,000 AD approached, many then thought the Millenium would arrive. They gave away all their belongings and some burned their houses down to prevent the stay-behinds from profiting. They all went up on a hill with great expectations. By morning, someone said "Oh Crap!".
I had a friend that was truly disappointed that the world didn’t fall apart.
Pre-Y2K my wife asked me if we should purchase a generator for our house because of "probable" power outages.
My reply was..."Nah, I'll wait til February and buy one at a garage sale!"
I worked in an IT group at Bank of America at the time. We were flipping and flying like mad, documenting everything to within an inch of its life.
Fortunately for me, the underlying software used for my main application stored dates as the number of days since 1760, or some such date, and had an algorithm to convert it to a human understandable date, much like Excel does it now.
Even luckier for me, my main incoming files, from a COBOL-based system, had undergone a fairly substantial rework in the mid-90s. We had the foresight then to add one “minor” change to the interfaces, to make the dates in the record use four digit years instead of two. So 95% of my incoming records were already “Y2K compliant” long before the event.
About the only good thing I recall from the incident is that the bank had developed some very serious plans for emergency backup and relocation just in case. These plans became valuable when 8 floors of our New York operations went out on 9/11/2001. IIRC, all of the operations were up and running at our New Jersey backup site by end of business that day.
We did so well that people make fun of the big Y2K dud to this day.
Nothing happened because lots of smart people were paid well to work hard to fix it.
For me, the funniest thing about Y2k was going to Costco after the first of the year. The returns line was ridiculously long. People were returning everything from power generators to peanut butter and potato chips. It was comical. If we had had smart phones back in the day I’d have taken a picture of it. :)
And no, it wasn't a joke. Just an example of the trouble if the work hadn't been done.
I told everyone my coffee pot was too stupid to care what the year was. All it knew was that at 0600 it turned itself on and brewed up the coffee.
By the the time I got in the kitchen there it was - a fresh pot of coffee.
I prepped abundantly but I didn’t buy the horror stories, since I’ve read the end of the Book. I did create a new sofa in the den from big packs of tp and a furniture cover. It was comfy, too, but gone in about a year. Watched the rollover in Australia on TV - celebration time!
REPENT!
I remember going to a New Year’s Eve party and they really did party like it was 1999, nobody was talking about it but we all got plastered. I think most of the people there were just thrilled that the lights stayed on after the stroke of midnight.
I described the Y2K bug to my father in great detail.
He understood.
I described the nightmare scenario.
He replied “if that happens I’ll throw on the fire and go back to my book.”
He actually was that ready.
That’s prepping: seamless living in the face of disaster.
No issues at all.
I thought “something” was going to happen. I told that to a friend, and it was the first time I heard the term, when I was told to lose the “tin foil hat.”
How much money did the federal government spend on y2k?
https://slate.com/technology/2009/11/was-y2k-a-waste.html
Answer: $9 billion
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