Ten Years Later

[Coach]

It's hard to believe the aughts have come and gone.

I spent New Year's Eve of 1999 watching the computers I was responsible for at the time. Needless to say, nothing interesting happened.

But I think that's the last time I made it to midnight on New Year's Eve

Does anyone have a good Y2K story, now that 10 years have gone by?

Coach

 

[tryan]

no , I am too busy planning for 12/21/12

 

[W2R]

You would not have BELIEVED the amount of fireworks here in New Orleans that night. No way could anyone even hear themselves think. I have never seen nor heard anything like it since. The whole city was lit up.

I got up at 6 AM on 1/1/2000, got in my car and drove around to see if the streetlights worked and so on. Of course, they did!! I went to the ATM and took out some cash. Of course, it worked. I came home and checked my phone and computer, which were fine. Then I felt like such a dope for even wondering if the predictions and rumors were true! I knew there were logical reasons why they shouldn't be, but was just scared anyway.

 

[MasterBlaster]

YouTube - Apple Commercial - HAL2000

 

[Sam]

Ok, so the Y2K bug did not happen. But that does not mean the threat was not real. It did not happen mainly because so much effort was done to prevent it. In an interconnected world, a small, insignificant bug can potentially cause massive breakdown.

After seeing some of those preventive effort, I was relatively confident that Y2K, if triggered, would not be devastating. But I wasn't 100% sure. So I made sure that I had 30K cash and 1kg of gold in my hand before the new year. I kept the gold for six months (I think) and sold it for a 2% profit.

Sam

 

[TromboneAl]

I also cut my equities allocation in 2000, expecting that even if there was no Y2K problem, that people would worry that there would be (or would worry that people would worry that there were people that would be), and would sell.

That was my last market timing effort. It actually paid off, because I was slow to DCA back into equities, and avoided some of the March 2000, downturn.

I also wonder what would have happened if there hadn't been a big effort to fix Y2K problems.

 

[MasterBlaster]

This one is pretty funny...

YouTube - Y2K Commercial

 

[Moemg]

I was in New York City at Times Square on Dec.31 st. of 1999 but flew out before midnight . I wasn't really expecting anything so I did not stock up but shortly after that I met my SO who had stocked an incredible amount of canned food for Y2K . We still laugh about that . Well mostly I laugh .He has a degree in Engineering and a law degree so he takes those things seriously .

 

[Jay_Gatsby]

No Y2K stories here, and not to derail the thread, but my life is so dramatically different than it was 10 years ago, my former self would be amazed. Let's see:

1. Married
2. New daughter
3. In-house counsel with reasonable hours (instead of a huge firm)
4. Hobbies I enjoy
5. Physically strongest I've ever been in my life
6. Knocking on the door of seven figures net worth

I could go on, but that isn't the point of this thread.... but I'm still amazed.

 

[easysurfer]

I remember being on call 12/31/99 and I remember in my PJs watching TV when my phone rang. It was a conference call with my co-w*rkers and department manager (a real nice supervisor). I can't help but remember during the call, I was thinking to myself, WTF? It's Christmas week and here we are on a business conference call. But I understood as how many Y2Ks do we have, anyhow.

As a very bright person said to me once, during the Y2K turnover, I helped saved the world (as least I like to think that).

 

[harley]

I look back on Y2K fondly, as it kept many of my cow erkers meaningfully employed well past their expire by date. Without it there would have been no need for COBOL programmers at all in the late 90s early aughts.

no , I am too busy planning for 12/21/12

And if we make it past that one, there's still Y2K38 to deal with. It never ends.

 

[ERD50]

Ok, so the Y2K bug did not happen. But that does not mean the threat was not real. It did not happen mainly because so much effort was done to prevent it. In an interconnected world, a small, insignificant bug can potentially cause massive breakdown.

Sam

I was involved with a lot of the checking out of our systems at work in the months leading up to Y2K. Most of it struck me as rather silly, but then we were surprised at some of the things that had time dependencies in them that we didn't know about. A piece of equipment might go through some internal compensation check on a certain time interval, for example - and the Y2K bug might affect it. Mostly a matter of updating firmware provided by the equipment suppliers. I don't think we had any issues at all with the change, hard to say if the many "fixes" we put in really made a difference or not.

I didn't take any special precautions at home, and I recall relaxing a bit as the reports came through from the other side of the world that their lights were still on.

-ERD50

 

[walkinwood]

We had a y2k party at my home with a lot of our closest friends.

I thought I'd have to play Bob Dylan's Everything is Broken at midnight, but ended up playing Bob Marley's Everything is Gonna be Alright.

Y2K would have been a mess were it not for all the effort & money put into correcting the software flaws.

 

[Alan]

I remember y2K very well. I was in charge of all computing at a large chemical facility and we had plenty to do in the run up. For example the purchasing system needed major changes as all PO numbers started with a 2 digit year and the search algorithm could not find a single PO once it started with 00. (We have development and test systems for all our major systems so we could test quite easily to see where we had problems)

Of the process control systems running the plants only one had an issue and it was to do with trending historical data on the operator consoles. Nothing dangerous but a real PITA. I told the production manager that the vendor offered an upgrade to fix it for $75k, or we could set the clock back "x" years so that the days of the week lined up with 2000 - so what if the year was 1982. However he went for the fix and after many fruitless attempts by the vendor they couldn't get the new system to work and so we got our money back and changed the clocks on the consoles.

Come New Years Eve I had 3 folks on site to cover the warehouse systems, the control systems and the networks. I brought the alcohol-free champagne which we used to celebrate after nothing happened and we had a jolly old time walking around the control rooms etc.

On the following Monday folks discovered that phone messages were being auto-deleted as the phone system thought messages in 2000 were 99 years old No big deal.

In March when the older, closed, PO's were archived in the annual cleanup all closed PO's were deleted and had to be recovered from back-up tape (missed the search algorithm in that particular program)

On a personal level I just withdrew an extra $400 ahead of time in case of a "run" on atm's by panick'ed people. I made no investment changes but made sure I had copies of the latest statements for all my accounts.