I was considered “brave” and “crazy” for offering to work that shift. People were losing their minds. It was the first time I realized how gullible the general public was. I was the calm in the storm. I reminded them that air was not controlled by a computer and we would survive. It would be like “camping nursing.” Midnight -NOTHING- and people felt stupid. I’m ready for that feeling again. It was priceless.
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I worked that shift, too, and I'm here to tell everyone that it wasn't a hoax. The company I worked for had all of their dates as YYMMDD (the century wasn't stored), to save space. At that time, people generally didn't think the current round of programs would be around until 2000, figuring that new programs would replace the old. Well, that didn't happen, so we had to add the century to every date used in the database and programs.
We were a specialty production company and we had to maintain a record of all of the events that occurred for each product, as the next person down the line needed to know what had occurred prior. We spent a couple of years changing everything -- and I mean everything -- over to YYYYMMDD. This was for thousands of programs. For us, it was do or die, else we would lose the correct order of events and everything with a date would be out of order once the year 2000 data began to be entered into the system.
The entire IT department was there on Dec. 31, 1999. We held our collective breaths to see what would happen. Thankfully, all of our hard work paid off. We had a program or two here and there where something was missed, but it was quickly fixed and reinstalled. Y2K was only a nothingburger because we worked like dogs to make sure that it was.
I agree. Our IT department worked overtime to fix all the problems. Had it not occurred, some serious infrastructure problems would have occurred in this country. I won't say who I work for, but I know enough that had we not fixed our code across all of our apps, the economy could have been ground to a very slow crawl.