Title: Happy non-event, y'all
Music du jour: Dave Matthews Band, Crash
Kids! I'm back! Pretend to be thrilled, all right? Just throw money.
So, Y2K came and went with a whimper, not a bang. I must say that I'm not all that surprised. I've been saying for a couple of years that Y2K wasn't going to be as big a deal as the alarmists were screaming it would be. Hell, I wish I would have written some of those Chicken Little books. You know, the ones that can be summed up by, "The sky is falling! The world is going to end! We're all gonna die! AHHHHHH!!!" I could have made some seriously good money selling millennium snake oil. Why didn't I think of that?
Oh well. The best part of all this is I finally get to say, "I told you SO!" to the idiots who were convinced the world was magically going to disappear on 1 January. Believe me, I try not to make fun of people. Really, I don't. But GOD, this is just too easy. I mean, I prepared, okay. Ian and I prepared for Y2K just as we would for a blizzard, which means three or four days worth of food and a full tank of gas in the car. No big deal... it's a good idea anyway. That was about all we figured we would ever need, in our educated opinions as information technology professionals. So when Australia and New Zealand starting rolling over midnight to 1 January, I was watching and listening. I sat in the Memphis airport and read the headlines from Yahoo on my cell phone to see what was going on. Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Russia...
Nothing. Except for a few isolated problems here and there, all of which were resolved quickly, the rollover went off without a hitch. Even in Russia, which was only 34% compliant, things remained quiet. I sat there in the airport and just laughed.
Don't get me wrong... it could have been a lot worse. A LOT worse. Thanks in no small part to people like the year2000.com guys, who raised awareness about the bug back in 1995, what could have been a disaster was averted world-wide. And yes, I have geek friends who worked their asses off to get their company's systems Y2K-compliant. Those same geek friends sacrificed their New Year's Eve celebration to keep watch in case something did go wrong. And it could have, if the geeks and their bosses hadn't headed the crisis off at the pass.
This is the reason I was so confident that Y2K was going to be okay. The people that I know and work with were making sure everyone else would have electricity and things would remaind safe and sound. I have the utmost confidence in the geeks and nerds of the world... when a problem needs to be solved, they get on it and make sure it happens.
Did we overhype the Y2K bug? Most definitely. Was it a real problem with real consequences? Oh, yes. If you don't believe it, consider this article. This was a real problem that was fixed on time.
So. Planes didn't fall out of the sky, nuclear missiles didn't suddenly decide to launch themselves, and the power stayed on. Good for us. The next time you see a programmer, thank them for watching out for you.
Happy New Year.
-- marcie.