Y2 Crazy

A friend of mine reminded me that this past New Year's Eve marked ten years since the Y2K insanity. Ten years... how time flies. Seems like it was only yesterday.
   What was I doing? Glad you asked.
   I had started a new job in February of 1999. Being the new guy, and seeing as how shit flows downhill, I got to be our department's Y2K compliance guy. Wheeee!
   At the time the term Y2K hadn't quite taken hold, that really happened over the summer when clueless media finally got in on the panic. Since the company I worked for had mainframes, and since they knew five years before they were going to have a problem, they'd already come up with their own term, Change of Century. Y2K vs. CoC. You can see the reason Y2K won out.
   Anyway, I spent about half my time from March until December documenting in detail exactly why going to a 4-digit year wasn't going to have an effect on any of our systems. I talked to software vendors, I talked to hardware vendors, I talked to programmers, I talked to administrators, I got piles and piles of supporting documentation from everybody under the sun.
   I even spent quite a while devising my own tests and verifications for systems that other people had already tested and verified. Why? Because my manager wanted it. Why did he want it? Because his manager wanted it, and so on up the line. In an amazing spasm of incompetence and insecurity, our senior management decided not to accept the results of tests anyone else performed outside the company. We had to verify the operation ourselves. Twice. Several times I spent an 'executive hour' (fifty minutes) going over my test results with a VP who clearly had no idea what I was talking about. He just wanted to be able to tell his boss he'd heard it for himself, in person.
   Fast forward to New Year's Eve, 1999. I had to be at work. Yup, despite the three-foot stack of proof I had that there would be absolutely no problem with any system I or my team touched, used, or breathed on, I had to be in the building along with about 500 other unfortunates. 'Just in case.' Just in case what they never said.
   We counted down the minutes in a large meeting hall, where they plied us with candy and caffeine. When I say I would rather have been anywhere else I really mean it. It would have been less punishment to be snuggled up to a huge, hairy murderer in prison. But I don't have that kind of luck.
   Three... Two... One...
   Everybody waited, as if the carpet were going to roll up and the ceiling would collapse. Nothing happened. The lights didn't go out, no planes fell from the sky, there was no more panic or looting than is usual for New Year's Eve. A big, fat non-event. And I wasted it being at work. I went back to my desk, did about 45 minutes of tests to verify - AGAIN - that I hadn't been lying with all the other tests I did needlessly, and then I went home.

Later that night I got a call from a severely drunk friend of mine who needed a ride home. He was so intoxicated that he fell asleep against the windows of my new truck, leaving nose and eyelash prints on the glass. Even that was more fun than what I'd been doing.