No Stupid Questions

Y2K is one of those stories we look back on and think what a silly old load of nonsense. Truth is, if it wasn’t for the countless hours of overtime people put in to making those outdated systems support the date change, it really would have been utter carnage. You saw how crazy things got when we started to run low on toilet paper for a few weeks.

I was doing tech work back then (still do, but I used to, too!)

It was a lot of low scale doomsday prepping. Making sure you had enough canned goods and water and stuff.

Majority of folks had no clue and did no prep at all. Tiny minority went end times level.

I made sure that I had 6 gallons of water in the fridge and groceries.

Mostly we partied like it was 1999.

No, it wasn’t like that. Remember that while computer technology was fairly mainstream, it wasn’t nearly as engrained into our lives as today. So people were talking about a worst-case scenario that involved technological things: potential power outages, administrations maybe shutting down, some public transportation maybe shutting down, … To me, it felt like people were getting ready for being potentially majorly inconvenienced, but that they weren’t at all freaking out.

I do remember the first few days of January 2000 felt like a good fun joke. “All that for this!”

I was in high school, and I remember babysitting my brother's kids for new years. I'd invited a friend to hang out with me while I watched them, but her parents were very freaked out about Y2K and insisted she stay home with them. They did do some prepping on water and canned goods, but not quite to the "bunker under their floorboards" level. As for me and my family, we carried on as if life would continue as normal, and thanks to countless people working tirelessly, it did just that.

I worked as a cto in a publicly traded bank in the USA. In the USA, the regulation was that all banks had to have 10% of all deposits in cash. For example, If you were a billion dollar bank, you had to have 100 million in cash available at all times.
Because of Y2K, there were deep concerns their would be a bank run, so all banks had to have 20% of deposits as cash. Enormous sums of cash.
On New Year’s Eve 1999, my wife and I were taken by federal authorities to a safe house, where we were heavily guarded. We knew in advance they were taking us, but we didn’t know where and when it happened our cell phones were taken from us. Around 4 am they said everything was ok, my wife and I opened some champagne and they drove us home.

People did most of the damage to their own systems with stupid (overdoing) testing in advance of Y2K.

Many regular/timed jobs in the system.

Set the clock forward by a few years.

Jobs running fine.

Set the clock back.

Jobs sitting in boredom, because all is done for the next few years... TADAA! :-)

I knew a family that bought a farm, bought a few years worth of food to start their stockpile, and buried thousands of gallons of fresh water to prepare for Y2K. No one else I knew took Y2K seriously. Look who's laughing now!

At the time I ran a large campus network where we spent all of December laying in contingency plans and doing tabletop drills just in case some Y2K bug hit and took us out.

I hosted a party that New Year's Eve, but stayed sober(-ish) so I could assess and deal with any fallout. Midnight approaches, we do the countdown. Clock hits zero and I smooch a couple of the ladies attending. I disappear to my home office upstairs to assess....

2 devices down, same location. 1 more device down, next door. Everything else us up and fine. Odd.

The devices all went down about 20 minutes prior to midnight. Not Y2K. Not critical sites, it can wait til next business day.

I close up shop about 0015 hours 2000-01-01 and go back downstairs to rejoin my party, aiming to catch up with the other drunks. Shenanigans ensue.

Reason For Outage: there was a frat house next door to the two buildings that went down, and they had a house fire that burned the tree out front, which scorched our aerial fiber runs into the next two buildings down. Ridiculous coincides are ridiculous.

So yeah. Y2K was a non-event.

Not far off from what I remember. Definitely knew people that went as far as buying land out in the mountains and stockpiled food and water there in a cabin.

My dad worked at a bank at the time. I don't know much about his job, it's over my head, something about daily transfers and loans of large amounts of money between banks, dealing with the federal reserve, and making sure bank reserves are stable and where they need to be (he's the person I call whenever I hear of a coming recession or a bank collapse that hits the news, because he gives me the no bullshit or hysteria facts of whether or not I should be concerned and start buckling down or not). I was just a kid for Y2K, but I do remember it's the only time in my life my dad ever worked overtime, he went from being an off work at 5 on the dot to not getting home until after our bedtime every day for months before New Years. I honestly have no idea what he was doing, but he was busy making sure something was good to go.

I grew up in Florida and anytime there was a hurricane coming people would flock to the stores and buy all the generators and bottled water.

It was kind of like that, but in December.

Most people I knew personally legit just ignored it. It was just another doomsday hoax like the Mayan calender scare of 2012. Everybody was talking about it, but nobody actually thought it would be an issue.

Some companies made money from some clueless managers and CEOs.

I worked at a big power and light company, some big boss at the headquarters hired a company to certify our pcs where y2k compliant (we already knew they were ok!).

A guy around 50 with suit and two younger technicians, around their twentys. I was behind them when when they sat down at every pc in our office, inserted a floppy disk, and ran a freeware software! A freeware that anyone could download from internet.

Of course the software printed on the screen that those pc where y2k compliant.

That company charged a fee for every certified pc, and we had lots of pcs.

I knew a guy who maxed out all his credit cards and said he was heading to the hills. He didn't say much for the week he stayed at the job after the new year last.

My boss demanded that the whole IT team was at work watching and waiting. I think he bought us a dozen doughnuts.

Of course, nothing critical happened at all. Some websites showed a date of January 1, 19100. That was all.

I just remember my mom buying a lot of batteries, and me being happy, because that meant I could have a lot of time with my Gameboy.

I was on a school trip for New Year's Eve that year. There had been some parents who didn't think their kids should go because we might not be able to get back if all the airplanes fall out of the sky at midnight.

Obviously, nothing happened. I understand the big affected only older systems, and it's not like admins just heard the news and sat around. They fixed the bug.