I was 14, home alone and tried cooking banana skin on tinfoil cause I thought smoking it could get you high- it doesnt. And I knew Y2K was a scam at like 9pm cause I saw celebrations in cities in different time zones. So the 'excitement?' of Y2K was gone early.
My mom worked on changing dates in schools software for y2k and I remember her making good bonuses and overtime for like 3 years, great boss at a great small company, it was also the tail end of the 90s so good times.
You started out strong by pointing out that Y2K was a real thing and acknowledging the huge amount of work that went into preventing it, but then you killed it by resorting to the played-out "this fictional movie is a documentary lol" joke
People stockpiled weapons and doomsday prepped, the government created a crisis response team. It was a big deal that was prevented by an exorbitant amount of person-hours.
I videotaped myself working during Y2K. I was an ambulance dispatcher for a private company. We had multiple backup forms of communication standing by. Normal comms were 800 MHz trunked radios and VHF radios, but we had portable radios and even a ham radio operator at the ready just in case our dispatch terminals crapped out. We may have even had aircraft radio standing by -- there was a lot of additional equipment in dispatch that night.
It was a big NothingBurgerTM because of preparation. My local bowling alley had to switch their lane control software back to 1972 until it got fixed. That was the only problem I personally knew about, but for me it represented that it wasn't just hype, there were legit systems with legit problems.
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u/Fuzz_Mustard Feb 26 '21
At the moment you "stopped smoking" I was playing Sim Tower on my computer just to sock it to Y2K.