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.
A voice of reason. If it was a nothingburger it's because all of the critical systems that needed fixing were fixed in time. Simple as that.
You are exactly correct, fren. Failure, in this case, was not an option.
The part that was a "hoax" was how blown out of proportion it all was. Nobody is saying there weren't real issues that switching centuries caused in computer programs.
Hindsight 20-20. How could anyone know ahead of time how successful companies would be in fixing the problem? There was no agency making sure that every company was doing their due diligence.
Even if every company completely failed at making this transition, the results still wouldn't be as catastrophic as what many people believed. That was the hoax.
That’s the way I looked at it, ESPECIALLY in nursing. We weren't even using infusion pumps yet.
Hopefully people like you are doing the same for us now.
Thank you. I was once a programmer/analyst for a while. I was working a different job by 12/31/1999, but yes, it was a very real concern and many folks just like you made sure nothing crashed.
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.