What were doing the night before Y2K?

[callthatgirl]

Davena and I were talking about Office Space this morning and the Y2K conversion, she has her stories to add here, but my stories was this...

I was working at a University computer lab and we spent months adding in the code via floppy drive to make each computer ready for Y2K. I remember the buzz and excitement in our IT dept on what was going to happen on Jan 1, 2000. NY Night of 1999, I was out and partying of course but remember wondering all night long was my computer at home going to boot up. I came home that night and booted it up (Non-patched) and yep, booted up fine, no issues, date said "Jan 1 2000". I called my network tech friend at the U and he said that all the non-patched systems all worked fine, so that work was for nothing.

What's your story?

 

[Davena]

I was sleeping on a cot in a Steel Mill Server Room. Spent the previous two weeks running from system to system with a floppy much like Lisa. Since the metal heats were hundreds of thousands each and production was still live - the whole team had to be there overnight.

 

[RCD_Technology_Solutions]

I was in NYC watching the ball drop from the Manhattan Athletic club, went home afterwards and jumpped on a 6 AM flight to Cinncinnatti, Ohio to check a remote office. All was fine, then an afternoon flight to Cleveland to check another office and home the next day... No issues.

I was in a company with 16 remote offices and each IT person went to 2-3 office on 1-1-2000 lol

 

[PBComputer]

I can't remember, at that time CCR had not being born, I had just left school in the July. Most likely wasting time on IRC chat.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

A bunch of us from work spent a crazy partying weekend up in Newport Rhode Island. Back then I was working for a local franchise of a big chain called ComputerLand. The owners of the franchise I worked for had two stores in my state...Groton CT and Glastonbury CT.

Prepping for that overhyped Y2K thing....we were billing TONS of hours to BIOS upgrades across all sorts of large networks...back then we did Compaq business workstations (the Deskpro series...DP2000 models by the thousands, and for servers...the Prolinnea and Proliant series). So Compaq had these PCI cards to install on some rigs which over-rode old BIOS. And lots of floppy disks with BIOS flashes on them...I forget the nickname of those...CPQPaqs or something.

Anyways...that weekend, bunch of us from that work..and some friends...hit Newport for the weekend. I dont' remember much....when I woke up on Sunday...someone to the left of me, someone to the right of me....musta been a good night. Long painful hangover ridden drive home.

....FYI....the Abacus was an ancient computer that was Y2K compliant all along!

 

[gadgetfixup]

I had just finished doing a computer trade show and at midnight I was still up counting, sorting and bundling money. I remember feeling sick I had tons of Y2K t-shirts, mugs and keychains I hadn't sold and knew I was now stuck with them. I still have cases of mugs left, but the shirts came in handy when detailing the cars.

I didn't miss the constant questions by customers about what's going to happen on Jan 1, 2000 or if our systems were Y2K compliant. I think Y2K was one of the biggest jokes pulled on consumers.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I didn't miss the constant questions by customers about what's going to happen on Jan 1, 2000 or if our systems were Y2K compliant. I think Y2K was one of the biggest jokes pulled on consumers.

It had its overhype...for most people, such as residential users.
However...many business applications, accounting for example. Lots were coded to look at the years in 2 digit format.
99 minus 98 = 1 year
But 00 or 01 minus 98 is ???

They had to have patches or updates installed to flip the counters to look at 4 digit years.

 

[gadgetfixup]

Yeah some application issues were very real but most of the hardware issues were pure hyperbole.

 

[nlinecomputers]

Driving to Odessa to meet my fiancee's parents for the first time. Y2K issues had been resolved weeks prior except for the one client that REFUSED to upgrade. Idiot was shut down come the first business day. But we had his upgrade software waiting and we billed him triple time just so that he could get first in the queue.(which really was just punishing the arsewipe for being such a damn cheap *******.)

 

[PCX]

Playing TMNT on Super Nintendo . . . .

 

[Markverhyden]

Hanging out with my daughter in Houston.

 

['putertutor]

I remember counting down as the ball dropped. Hoping for even just the lights to flicker or sirens to start blaring. Nothing. [sigh]. Oh well. Guess I'll have to wait for Y10k! Or at least 1/19/2038.

 

[gikstar]

Praying that the IRS would lose all of their records...

 

[Krynn72]

I was on my computer playing Ultima Online with my cousin, making fun of the Y2K hysterics but secretly hoping the school's computers would mess up and we'd have the next day off.

 

[AndyM]

I was in Dover, DE with the ex , hoping I wouldn't have to see the in-laws too many more times lol. That night, we went to a Y2K party. I got carded, and they just let the ex straight through. She was really upset, as she was 15 years younger than me lol

What can I say? The alcoholic pickling process is really preserving my good looks

Prior to travelling to Dover, I had the wonderful job of manually checking 3200 PC's along with 58 servers to ensure that they were all Y2K compliant.

Andy

 

[acs]

I was working a shift team leader at a Chemical plant on that night. We had to shut all chemical reactors down before midnight then wait until 1 am before starting them all back up again after checking that all process instruments were reading correctly.

 

[Screwloose]

At that time I was working IT for a Nylon plant. I spent the week manually getting all the PCs ready and on New Years Eve I had to come in along with a handful of other IT folks and walk around the plant all night checking to make sure all of the production areas were up and running. After about 3:30 a friend of mine suggested we go to "lunch" so we got our supervisor to let us go off site for an hour and eat as long as we brought food back for anyone else that wanted it.... well big mistake. I was already dog tired and after eating I fell asleep in my chair when I got back to work. My boss chewed me out because what if "something related to Y2K had shut down the plant while I had been out for 20 minutes at 5:00 am.

That was the first and pretty much only time I ever told one of my bosses what an ass he was lol. He did not argue the point to his credit.

 

[JustInspired]

What were you doing the night before Y2K?

Partying like it was 1999

 

[Moltuae]

I've still got a government-issued booklet somewhere, all about the impending doom and how to deal with it. I think it's the same as this one: http://flickrhivemind.net/Tags/millennium,millenniumbug/Interesting


I did pretty much nothing in preparation for the event, to be perfectly honest. While part of me started to believe some of the hype and scaremongering, the firmware programmer part of me said "how bad could it be"? I figured it would be less work to pick up the pieces afterwards than it would be to prepare for it. As it turned out, there were no pieces to pick up, so the gamble paid off.

What was worse for me about Y2K was that it was the year I turned 30 .... signifying the end of my youth ... or so it seemed at the time. 15 years on, I'd be happy to be 30 again.

 

[dombooth]

No idea, I was 6.

Dom