What were you doing 15 yrs ago?

[capncarl]

The thread How do you heat your shop made me think of this! Remember the Y2K ordeal we went through 1/1/2000? How many of you are still eating dried beans and rice that your bought tons of to keep from starving when all the grocery stores closed because their cash registers would never work again? I've got some friends that still have food stocks left from then! My kerosene heater was bought for Y2K because the power grid was going to leave us cold. I've still got quite a supply of ammo left, that I am glad of with today's price. Who else has good Y2K stories?
capncarl

[Black wallnut]

Y2K another case of media inspired hysteria. I recall my employer requiring our branch manager to fill out a bunch of reports on anything electronic out of fear. I speculated at the time that it would be a huge non-event. Time proved me right.

[capncarl]

Lots of fund remembering all the second guessing we were involved in.
Financially I made the biggest awww crap of my life when I pulled enough $$ from my 401k to pay for my 2 boys college before it disappeared with the collapse of the financial system. I beat the system to the punch except I invested it in the wrong things. Ouch. Then the IRS comes into the picture.

[leehljp]

2 stories:

1. When overseas (Japan for us) our org gave us $750 for food or generator or whatever to prepare for 2000. Several of us used that to fly back to the States and spend a couple of weeks visiting family! That is what LOML, youngest daughter and I did. Tickets at that time cost about $750 so we got the equivalent of a free ticket. (With that trip, LOML, daughter and I completed enough milage for round trip tickets between Japan and the US.)

2. There was a used car dealership in south Memphis that only stayed in business for about a year. It was only 1,998,000 years ahead of its name:
The dealerships name: Y2000K Auto

I took a picture (before I had a digital) and the photo is somewhere in my Japan photos.

[atgcpaul]

I wasn't even 25 yet. I was somehow the sysadmin for all the Sun Solaris machines in our lab and I spent several weeks figuring out how to apply patches. I finished in time and on Y2K, my parents, sister, aunt/uncle, and sons and I were in Burma visiting family for the first time since we left 20 years earlier. On the way back we stopped in Hong Kong for a few days.

I don't remember ANY Y2K fervor in either of those two places.

Paul

[TB Roye]

I was still working in 2000 and that my mom was in the hospital and passed away a few weeks later. At work there was thingw we had to do just incase, but for the life of me I can't remember what it was other than backing up all our filew onto CD's just incase. think I spent the evening at the Hospital and then was probably sound asleep at midnight. Woke up the next day and nothing had changed. So much for Y2K I am still am in bed and asleep when midnight come but usually get woken up by fire works and gun fire. This year there wasn't much, maybe the moved.

Tom

[dbhost]

Y2K wasn't entirely unfounded... I worked for a car dealership chain and we had several failures based on VERY outdated systems they refused to update / replace. Y2K forced them to upgrade...

[Condoman44]

Y2 busy was more like it

I worked for a large insurance company and we were required to be on the job from 10:00 PM 12/31 to 9:00 AM 1/1. Nothing went wrong as we had spent two years getting ready. I got some fantastic photos of the fireworks at the state capitol at midnight because of the high rise floor I could shoot from.

I shepherded the use of universal calendar routines in the companies COBOL, re-wrote the routines that would fail and supported the programmer tools to help them get their code up to working order.

These were busy times for programmers. I spent 13 years at that company before retiring 5+ years ago.

[cwsmith]

A total non-event for us and where we lived at the time. I was working for Dresser-Rand then, and had just moved from Technical Publications up to Product Marketing and was in the midst of designing a database to handle our product installation history and build our manual order pages into one integrated system.

As part of that process, I was trying to get the Systems Dept to get their mainframe-mindset to let me transfer files over to our LAN. While they seemed to be concerned with the possibilities of the Y2K fever, they felt their normal day-to-day disaster preparedness procedures had them covered... and they wanted to make sure that my activities fell in with that. I was further backing things to CD-ROM as well as documenting my procedures and hard-copying my progress.

On the home front, I had an engineer living next door who just happened to be working on shutting down the nearby coal-fired power plant. I had asked him and he didn't think there was a thing to worry about. Never-the-less, we always kept a pretty good pantry (a couple of week's supply) and as a Ham Radio operator, my equipment and battery backup-power would keep us in contact for at least short term. The local police and volunteer fire department were also prepared from as far as I could tell. With the police, who I was doing some database work with, also told me they'd gladly move a generator up to my place (we're only a stone's throw away) if necessary to aid in outside communication.

Nothing of course came from any of that and it all proved to be what most of us thought. My only disappointment was that I was hoping to pick up a real bargain on a generator afterwards, which never happened. I figured there would be a lot of people trying to get some of their money back once they found no use for the things. I do know all the local stores were sold out well before New Year's.

I still wonder how many of those generators are sitting in people's garages and sheds, having never been used?

The one thing that concerned me back then was "What IF?". Surely we'd have been okay for a short time, but what happens when the batteries finally go dead, there's no fuel for the generator's or the car, and the food runs out after a few weeks? We had an alternative heating system, but what if the LP finally runs out? It would have been one big Sci-Fi story coming true and most of us just can't stockpile for months or years.

CWS

[capncarl]

The "what if" planning that we did in preparation for a long time outages affected my way of thinking and savings practices. It scares me to think that all our savings and investments could vanish with the blink of a computer with no recourse.
capncarl

[Bruce Cohen]

Who remembers that far back?

Fifteen years ago, I'm lucky if I can remember what I had for breakfast this morning.

Oh wait, I was 15 years younger!!!

Bruce

[lrr]

A friend of mine bought a new 2000 Volkswagen Beetle, and got personalized plates for it -- Y2K BUG. I thought that was perhaps the best personalized plate I'd ever seen.

Second place goes to a Corvette in California I saw during the gas crisis many years ago -- 55 SUX.

[TB Roye]

What would happen now if one of our "enemies" did a major cyber attack that shuts down communications and or the Grid. I don't think we are prepared like we were for Y2K


Tom

[capncarl]

If the grid was shut down there would be a mess. Very few people around here have alternate heat sources, and even fewer now keep enough groceries to get by longer than the big game on Saturday. Quite honestly I don't even want to think about it, I don't think there is any way to plan around it.
capncarl

[Hellrazor]

What would happen now if one of our "enemies" did a major cyber attack that shuts down communications and or the Grid. I don't think we are prepared like we were for Y2K

I could part ways with my work cellphone! Otherwise it would be bad... real bad.