The 25 Hour News and The Millennium Blues
Y2K – remember that? It was going to screw-up the world’s computers on New Year’s Day 2000, and we’d all travel back in time to 1900. It never happened. Mind you, a lot of things never happened as the twentieth century passed into the twenty-first. Fifteen years we’ve been here now, and it’s not really been that brilliant, actually.
I’ve always loathed the fake, enforced jollity of December 31, so I spent that night in 1999 at home – with my dog and my cat. At the time, I was living on the ground floor of a house whose decrepit landlady had a Rigsby-like habit of loitering in the hallway and letting herself into my flat when she thought I was out. I also had to contend with two sisters I’d previously lived with knocking on my door at all hours; they were both good-looking girls, but a bit bonkers. And off their tits on crack and smack. And alcohol. I had to arrange for them to be rehoused in a hostel, but they had a boomerang quality to them and I eventually had to call their mother down in Gloucester to drag them home. At one stage, I even enlisted the help of a Gothette friend who was also a white witch for some supernatural intervention. I was somewhat desperate! At the same time, I wasn’t entirely immune to what remained of their feminine charms, and it did get a little…er…decadent on occasions. Not a healthy place to be.
I approached the end of 1999 with an absence of cynicism, feeling quite grateful I’d been born at a time when I could have a foot in two separate centuries; I was moderately excited, if truth be told, aware not everyone I’d known in my 32 years had lived to see this event. I remember watching that live broadcast from the Dome – well, it was on the telly. As midnight was minutes away, I played ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ and ‘A Day in the Life’; I don’t know why; they just seemed appropriate. And then we were somewhere else, technically; but nothing really changed in my life until the summer of 2001 when I moved again. Fifteen years on from the moment when years stopped having ‘nineteen’ as a prefix, it does feel like things have changed; and in a lot of cases, not necessarily for the better. Mind you, fifteen years ago I was just coming to terms with my first laptop. And now I’m utilising technology to speak to all of you’s. That’s not a bad improvement.
Where were you, then?
Petunia Winegum
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April 11, 2015 at 9:27 am -
As the clocks changed from 31/12/1999 to 01/01/2000, I logged on to the website that I’d built for Maplin Electronics and ordered a cable to make sure nothing had been affected by the millenium bug. Everything worked perfectly. This kind of justified my view that the whole Y2K thing with planes falling out of the sky was more bullshit than anything else.
I went to see the exhibition at the Dome around Easter Time – how very weird and expensive that was, wandering around in something that was a cross between an art gallery, the science museum and a giant circus. Very strange.
Looking back 15 years on it seemed that the whole gateway to the 21st century thing was mostly hype. Sure, we’ve got the internet and lots of technology, but we had quite a lot back then in the 1990’s – just got smaller, cheaper and better.
Where’s my jet pack? or my fusion energy too cheap to meter or my ticket to the moon on Pan Am?
So far the 21st century has been a major disappointment. It’s like the 70’s with Facebook.
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April 11, 2015 at 9:43 am -
I was a bit disappointed in 1999 that there was no colony on the moon, as Gerry Anderson had predicted.
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April 11, 2015 at 9:57 am -
They were uncannily close with their prediction of Jungle Justice in TV21 however, and gay icons.
http://ebid.s3.amazonaws.com/upload_big/4/0/7/1374218049-14691-2.jpg-
April 11, 2015 at 10:01 am -
That could be ‘Joey Essex’ in the Ant & Dec jungle show!
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April 11, 2015 at 12:59 pm -
So far the 21st century has been a major disappointment. It’s like the 70’s with Facebook.,
a highly qouteable qoute that, I shall purloin it. Could almost be from Pet’s Oompas.
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April 11, 2015 at 1:01 pm -
ugh! How did Spell check not pick up on ‘U’ after ‘Q’?!?!? Is there nothing I can rely on to do it’s job properly?
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April 11, 2015 at 3:17 pm -
Ah, the joys of 21st century technology! I’ve never bothered with spellchecker (as the regulars have no doubt noticed) having been brunged up proper like, and taught to use a dictionary. That doesn’t always work, either.
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April 11, 2015 at 3:42 pm -
Yes, the conundrum of the dictionary – how DO you find the word you don’t know how to spell?
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April 11, 2015 at 4:13 pm -
I can spill right enuff, just typing is difficult , what with the webbing between my fingers.
(actually it is usually because I have to mentally translate everything I write out of Denglisch first. Hence why I often miss out whole words and pronouns).
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April 11, 2015 at 4:24 pm -
April 11, 2015 at 5:56 pm -
it’s hair balls from your palms dropping down between the keys that is the problem.-The Landlady
*puzzled & perturbed* Not sure what you insinuating there…I know of only one reason of hairy palms but perhaps I missed a reference?
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April 11, 2015 at 5:32 pm -
I don’t think we are likely to be getting jetpacks on the high street until/unless they can solve the, not unrelated, problems of
a) flight times of less than a minute or so
and
b) the plummeting to earth in an instant death plunge if the things ever even momentarily stall.-
April 12, 2015 at 2:23 am -
Spoil sport – it works for the Jetsons!
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April 11, 2015 at 9:47 am -
http://s18.photobucket.com/user/horta/media/00.05.00.002_zpslicdhofp.jpg.html
That was me in the May of 2K , about to snack on a small child. Actually it was my nephew who had been born just before Y2K. The night of Y2K I was at work guarding stuff….actually several tens of millions of DMarks of stuff for a Japanese Games firm. Not wanting to appear ‘British’ -ie ‘lazy’ – I always worked Bank Holidays….extra money was handy too.
My Uncle was one of the GIGO Era of Computer experts when a computer took up a small detached house and had less memory than my ZX81. He was/is one of the leading lights in the UK computer world, some of you here probably know him. Anyways he had quieted my girly fears about what would happen on Y2K , that it was all a load of ‘bollocks’ (a technical term I believe) so I sat at work playing with my amazing cellphone that could send texts with COLOURED letters and watching the televisual countdown to technical Armageddon on German TV.
After the world not ending at 0:01 I cellphoned The Bestes Frau In The World to wish her a happy new year…whatever planet she happened to be on.
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April 11, 2015 at 9:49 am -
Dare I say that’s a really sweet photo?
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April 11, 2015 at 9:55 am -
Dare I say that’s a really sweet photo?
You may…always gotten on well with babies…probably something to do with my being on the mental wavelength of a 6month old child….
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April 11, 2015 at 10:04 am -
I was practically a full-time babysitter in the late 90s, looking after my girlfriend’s toddler whilst she was out scoring. Collecting the little ‘un from her playgroup always provoked interesting reactions from the proto-Mumsnet clique once they caught sight of the emaciated thin white duke on their doorstep.
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April 11, 2015 at 10:32 am -
I hear you on the ‘proto-Mumsnet’.If you were a ‘thin white duke’ then imagine their (the Mumsnetskis) to this Sex God In Black sitting on the bench of the playground watching the little children…
http://s18.photobucket.com/user/horta/media/img640_zpsghw3dtk9.jpg.htmlThat must have been 91, in Emden. That’s Crippled Son sitting on his trike- he couldn’t actually move it cos his legs didn’t work but he enjoyed sitting on it making ‘vroom’ noises. I probably had 3 knives on me and 0.13 Blood Alcohol Content.
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April 11, 2015 at 11:36 am -
April 11, 2015 at 7:19 pm -
Never mind the knives, that’s a fag in your fingers. How could you abuse a child like that!
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April 11, 2015 at 7:38 pm -
Never mind the knives, that’s a fag in your fingers. How could you abuse a child like that!
There is no end to my villainy, it gets much much worse. There was a time when Daddy would send any of his 3 boys-whichever one happened to be handy- to the Cigarette machine at the bottom of the street to buy his fags for him. Infact I think my kids knew how to work the Zigarettenautomat (Fag vending machine) before their eyes could focus on the shiny,evil,indoctrinating cigarette ads. Certainly they could read packet brand names before they could read their own names…or in Youngest Son’s case I don’t think he ever learnt to spell his own name.
You cannot imagine the sense of achievement Crippled Son felt, and my pride in him, the day he managed to pull himself up out of his wheelchair, and leaning against the fag vending machine, managed to compel his spasticated little hands to deposit the four DMark coins into the slot and then pull out the little door to retrieve Daddy’s brand. I fare wept I tell you!
Their childhood lullabies were tobacco jingles….”aus gutem Grund ist Juno rund” (Junos are round for a good reason), Evensong beer commercials.
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April 11, 2015 at 10:25 am -
I like kids, but I couldn’t eat a whole one.
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April 11, 2015 at 9:54 am -
That was the one night in my whole seventy-two years when I was deprived of sleep. From eight in the evening to eight in the morning there was urban noise, noise masquerading as music and after midnight, endless explosions in the surrounding neighbourhood.
I have never quite understood why anyone would want to celebrate a man-made event like hanging up a new calendar?
This is artificial, and now very, very commercial. We are not celebrating a event of nature. It is not the shortest day, and in the case of the year 2000, nothing of any significance happened two-thousand years ago. Christ was not born 2000 years ago.
Having said that, I have been to and enjoyed the company at many parties on a 31st December night, but they always wound up by 12:30am.
Feel free to party for eight hours at a time, if your body can stand up to it, but please don’t disturb those with a weaker constitutions. -
April 11, 2015 at 10:00 am -
My other half was on stand-by as manager of a large hotel where vast amounts of cash had been liberated from punters for that one-off spectacular, so we were confined to a ‘contactable’ zone, in the event a small gathering with friends to mark the memorable millennium moment. As the predictable fireworks happened, all the mobile phone networks jammed solid, so any prospect of her being called-out to solve some random hospitality crisis would have been futile anyway.
Approaching 50 at the time, I had anticipated the year 2000 for many decades, like most others expecting all the toys of Tomorrow’s World’s ‘space age’ to be commonly available. They weren’t, still aren’t and I’ll probably never see them.
In practice, that millennium moment was just another tick of a form of standardised time-measurement, nothing changed in the instant, only routine progress continued in its remorselessly hiccupped way: it still does, it still will, and it will still be doing the same when 2999 ticks over into 3000. But probably without Facebook.-
April 11, 2015 at 10:16 am -
Nobody who was around to rock to Zager & Evans would have expected much good to come from the future.
Some of it seems to have arrived an awful lot faster than expected however…
https://youtu.be/izQB2-Kmiic
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April 11, 2015 at 10:22 am -
I remember being exhausted and frustrated having spent hours trying to convince my father that the “doom and gloom” predictions were all bollocks. He’s the sort that swallows hook, line and sinker anything spouted by the TV or printed in the MSM, but refuses to believe anything either my brother or I try to tell him. My brother was working as a freelance programmer at the time, and told us of the mega bucks being conned out of the business community by IT “professionals” over the millennium bug and Y2K compliance, but my dad really believed that things like the toaster and washing machine would no longer function, and that planes would fall out of the sky.
I recall that the fireworks went on for ages, and seemed to spawn an upsurge in their use since then. It’s been more than 20 years since I last “celebrated” New Year’s Eve, and never really understood all the fuss surrounding the event. I always feel very depressed over the Christmas and New Year period. It’s not a holiday I look forward to at all. I don’t like the winter season anyway, with the cold grey days and almost endless hours of darkness, I sometimes think I suffer from SAD.
On December 31st 1999 I turned in early, and woke to find the world much as it was the day before. Looking back much has changed since my birth in 1956, some things have changed for the better, but a lot have changed for the worse – that’s how it feels anyway. I guess it’s probably a function of age, and has always been. -
April 11, 2015 at 10:31 am -
My brother was working as a freelance programmer at the time, and told us of the mega bucks being conned out of the business community by IT “professionals” over the millennium bug and Y2K compliance
Yup. This was the firm I worked for to a tea. I was earning about 45k a year (not that much in London at the time) and being billed out to firms in the City for 750 a day. Didn’t take long until I worked out the economics for myself, cut out the middle-man and went contracting. Unfortunately, by then, the Y2K spending spree was over
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April 11, 2015 at 10:43 am -
Mum died a week before my birthday in 1999, so the year began strangely. The cremation was a few days after said birthday and after all funeral expenses were paid, there was a little left over to split between my sister and me.
I already knew that NYE 1999/2000 would be expensive, hideous and hysterical in this country and said to my best mate did he want to stay here to be part of it (we were still both active on the club seen at that point), or if I spent the little left over insurance money on a trip for both of us, would he come? Yes, he would.
So NYE midnight I was on a beach in Sri Lanka with my best mate in the world. He said what should we do now? I said I had not come all the way to Sri Lanka to spend NYE with German and Dutch people, who were the largest component of guests at the hotel, nice though they were.
So we emptied the mini-bar into a plastic bag, took the ghetto blaster and left the hotel grounds from which Sri Lankans had been excluded and wandererd further down the beach where the locals were sitting around bonfires and letting off fireworks. We ended up chatting with a group of local youths who were with another British family. We partied to CDs I had mixed around the bonfire til 4 a.m. and then went to a Buddhist temple in the hills – a magical experience, with goats wandering around and owls perched here and there. Being a little tipsy, I can remember
going up one of these birds and stroking its breast and the monks being astonished because it did not allow people to do that – and not many had previously tried.So prayers were chanted for us (we had to pay for those) and then it was back to hotel to collapse.
Phoning home next day, we heard about the Dome debacle and the prices everything had cost and the crushes everywhere – we definitely made the right choice. And Sri Lanka is beautiful.
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April 11, 2015 at 11:07 am -
” on a beach in Sri Lanka with my best mate in the world”
Sounds far too romantic to ‘waste’ the moment on a ‘best mate’? (and yes I am aware that even raving benders can have platonic male friends :P).
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April 11, 2015 at 11:16 am -
By that point we were Platonic… the romance ended messily in 1994/95, but the love has endured – and so have the flaming rows. Thank God we are not partners and do not live together. But the world would be smaller, duller, and harsher without him in it.
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April 11, 2015 at 12:54 pm -
By that point we were Platonic
Ah right, I had wondered why you hadn’t taken the opportunity to go all Bowie/China Girl…I mean…come on…a warm beach at midnight, making love in the breaking waves…gotta be a favourite…sssSSSSSSSH.
But the world would be smaller, duller, and harsher without him in it.,
about the best definition of ‘love’ I’ve heard in a whiles. You are blessed to have someone you can say that about.
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April 11, 2015 at 1:12 pm -
I am blessed, and I know it! (He wouldn’t let me forget either.)
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April 11, 2015 at 11:38 am
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April 11, 2015 at 10:47 am -
How old was I then…65. My cousin, exact same age, had arranged a large family do to welcome in the new century, we all bought fireworks. When the buzzers went we all ‘celebrated’ and let off our stash of fireworks. I’m glad we were there. It was the start of bad times though for most that were present. After twenty years hidden my cousins cancer returned…same cells… and blew her away. My younger cousins father in law went senile and seriously attacked his wife and had to be sectioned. One of my nieces was already by polar and then got MS. My cousin’s new manfriend had a secret aneurysm and was gone in a few hours! Another admirer stepped into the breech. He was the leader of the band. He was in love…married… but he had to hover anxiously over her illness. My cousin went on with her social life with the bands elderly followers until near the end. They adored her and came in droves to the church. So it goes on…never lets up. One disaster after another. Close friends lost a charismatic daughter at 27 with cancer of the heart (2009)of all things! I can only somehow survive all this by empathy about persons outside my orbit. Most of the news about 21st century human behaviour worldwide thoroughly dimays me. Yet so many are screaming about the sixties and seventies…I don’t get it. Facebook/ Twatter…what is the matter with us?
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April 11, 2015 at 11:01 am -
I saw in y2k in northern China. I’d taken the precaution of banking up a “y2k fire” in the grate, and was tuned to BBC World Service TV or whatever it used to be called, waiting for the lights to go out, the communal heating to go off, the sewage to start backing up, and all the other treats allegedly in store for us when we arrived at the “dark side”, a.k.a. the 21st century.
What a joke. Y2k was the biggest con ever played by the IT industry. No doubt it won’t be the last.
And as countless pedants have pointed out, 2000 wasn’t even the right year to begin with.
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April 11, 2015 at 11:31 am -
Crikey, Petunia, I thought that was Nick Sanderson in the photo for a second… another young lad who had been mesmerized by Bowie:
http://thequietus.com/articles/00093-nick-sanderson-an-obituary-an-appreciationNew Year’s Eve 1999/2000? I genuinely can’t recall a single second of it, which is worrying. Er, down to it being totally unmemorable rather than my being inebriated, I think. Racking my brains but… nothing.
(The Y2K fiasco was good business for some, including – der! der! der! – the husband of the woman who supposedly introduced Carole Kasir to Fay/Moss of Elm-infamy. These dots were joined ages ago, in typically ludicrous fashion: the psychiatrist/social worker later died (!!!) and her husband (a Jew!!!) returned to South Africa (“probably for his own safety”!!!) where he had a laugh raking in a pot of cash flogging unnecessary whatnots to stop the world from grinding to a halt whilst ‘A Day In The Life’ was finishing up. No doubt pencilled-in for a a future explosive Sunday People front-page!)
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April 11, 2015 at 1:15 pm -
Mercifully I can recall nothing on that date. Probably laughing at the Eschaton believers.
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April 11, 2015 at 1:27 pm -
Eschaton
DAMN YOU! THAT was the word I was mentally hunting for when I wrote ‘Armageddon’…”Electronic Eschaton” (we talk of ‘eschatology’ in theology).
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April 11, 2015 at 1:42 pm -
Ah, Millenium Night. 15 years ago – so near but so far…
For me it started off very regular – NYE drinks at my Local with some mates & my younger brother – and wound up like a strange era-defining action-packed trippy Prodigy video (and I didn’t ‘use’ any substance other than booze) and a night that didn’t really conclude until around 7.30am.
The local was packed with revellers, plenty of ‘faces’ and friends and a splendid time was guaranteed for all. Nobody could send text messages after about 11pm, everyone was happy with no drama and after about 12.30, my brother (who was only 16) suggested we pop round to his mates house as there was a party. The house was full of his mates younger sisters’ friends pouting away in every room, me & my 32 yr friend (qualified barrister, as it happens, and as bald as a coot) felt somewhat out of place – like police on a raid maybe – and we quickly departed, but then word reached us that the local Manor House was ‘open’, so we headed there.The huge House had, until relatively recently, been used as council offices – it was where my Dad used to go to ‘pay the rates’ – but they had sold it and moved out and nobody knew which local wealthy businessman had bought it. 15 years later it has been redeveloped into ‘exclusive’ apartments plus large detached houses in the grounds, and I’m still none the wiser who owned at the turn of the millenium…. Anyway, whoever owned the estate had indeed gifted it to us local larrikins to see in the new century. Luckily, I did have a couple of disposable cameras (remember them?) with me that night, so I know it wasn’t another of my strange dreams.
The whole place was open – and being formerly used as council offices there were proper office toilets dotted around. There was boxes and boxes of Becks beer, white wine and red wine – free to all, free for all. Whoever it was had also rented a load of fruit machines and arcade consoles – those ‘driving’ ones you sit in, etc. Must have been there for about 5 or 6 hours: talking, drinking, observing. As time wore on the rooms were full of passed-out sleeping revellers… One mid-life-crisis smug guy we called ‘Titchsmarch’ (due to his resemblance to the green-fingered host of bland daytime chat shows) my mate gleefully discovered asleep on a toilet and poured a bottle of wine on his head- the silly sod was up & staggering around again 10 minutes later.
Oh, what a night.
As daylight returned, we started to make our own way home and my brothers feckless ingratitude drove me to my own mini-meltdown – the stash of drink we’d taken away he decided he ‘couldn’t be bothered to carry anymore’ so he just dumped it – I vaguely remember throwing full wine bottles at his feet to ‘make him dance’ before the resultant brawl… but I did have a point with what triggered that despite fighting being neither ‘my thing’ nor particularly defensible, and I rarely ever ‘snap’.Later that evening, my mate picked me up in his Fiat Panda Selecta, we met up with a couple of young ladies and gave them a New Year to remember – but, being a gentleman, I won’t trouble the locals here with the details….
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April 11, 2015 at 1:55 pm -
To be continued?
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April 11, 2015 at 2:08 pm -
Possibly. I may well collate my “Loaded/FHM Years” into bitesize chunks, given my time in that particular ‘mainstream’ manages to seem both quaint & edgy in equal doses when viewed from the blurred distance of 2015 Idiotland….
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April 11, 2015 at 2:19 pm -
Well, Petunia’s Tardis may well wash up on the shores of shared experience again at some point, I suspect.
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April 11, 2015 at 3:16 pm -
Well, Petunia’s Tardis may well wash up on the shores of shared experience again at some point, I suspect.
I hope so. Some of the best writing , not only yours but that of my fellow commentators, is when recounting the sins of Youth. Who can forget “AIDS, New York & a Windsock” or “Not Without My Pussy” ? Some real passion comes through, often absent in the more erudite comments. More than once I felt have felt like shouting at a commentator: “Yes you’re right and you obviously know more about it than i ever will but, dear God, does it have to be drier than a martini in on a dry day in Dryville?”
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April 11, 2015 at 3:55 pm -
And we haven’t even had any stories from behind the headlines of the Norfolk edition of ‘Take a Break’ yet.
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April 11, 2015 at 4:09 pm -
headlines of the Norfolk edition of ‘Take a Break’ yet
BABY BORN WITH 5 FINGERS ON EACH HAND! PICTURES INSIDE. Married Woman, 21, Gives Birth To A Baby After Having Sex With Her Human Husband-whom she was NOT related to!
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April 11, 2015 at 4:18 pm -
Dear me, the shocking state of Norfolk today.
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April 11, 2015 at 4:33 pm -
Dear me, the shocking state of Norfolk today.
Particularly when one considers the fact, that traditionally, the word for both ‘Girl’ and ‘daughter’ in Norfolk is “Mawther” (‘Mother’) and that there is no word in Norfolk for ‘hymen’…
At this rate “Selling flippers to Norfolk” will soon no longer be our “cokes to Columbia”.
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April 11, 2015 at 4:19 pm -
Not to get all luvvy and bleurgh… I always look forward to reading about your “colourful”? history and the Bestest Frau In The World. Some commenters here are brilliant, even when I vehemently disagree with them, and there are others who are so perceptive and funny… and I wish Fat Steve would get off his (presumably) fat arse and get back here.
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April 11, 2015 at 4:23 pm -
“and I wish Fat Steve would get off his (presumably) fat arse and get back here.”
WE all do….!
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April 11, 2015 at 5:40 pm -
Christmas and New year 1999/2000? Just finished a job in the Smoke doing Y2K upgrades on legacy systems. I remember renting a cottage down in Kernow with a bottle of single malt and an ageing Thinkpad for company. No Television, No Internet. Windy, mostly sunny. Empty beaches, empty roads and few speed cameras at that time. Foot down bliss.
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April 11, 2015 at 5:43 pm -
After 15 years as a cosseted expat, in a warm exotic location, I’d just been given the ultimatum. ‘Back to Aberdeen head office, or f**k off’.
In a dour and manky rented flat, for the first and last time, I caught genuine ‘man flue’ and slept through the whole damn thing ! -
April 11, 2015 at 5:44 pm -
Spent a very boozy evening with friends swearing at telly (coz of Blair – we new he was a cnut but nobody, at that stage, realised what a cnut he would go on to be).
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April 11, 2015 at 7:26 pm -
1999? Graduated from university that summer and found myself temping whilst still trying to find a job in the same field as my degree (Electronic Engineering). It would be another year before I gave up and switched to building websites. NYE was spent with my parents and brother, all of the immediate family left after nan had passed away that June from breast cancer*, and chuntering to myself that the Millennium still had another year to run.
*For better or worse, she insisted that neither my brother or I should be informed that she was ill as I was, as mentioned, doing my finals and he was sitting his A-Levels. I found out the day after my finals which was the day before she died. My brother, the poor sod, had found out the day before that when the hospital admin department screwed up and called home (they’d been specifically instructed not to) to discuss arrangements for getting nan home so she could die in her own bed. My mum, not thinking clearly, sent him in to school the next day to take an exam. Unsurprisingly he flunked his A-Levels and had to re-sit them the following summer.
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April 11, 2015 at 7:32 pm -
A miracle happened. My mate John the farmer (why so many Johns about that I have to index them by profession?) converted his barn into a spectacular nightclub. It was unbelievable that such a utilitarian building could be so dressed up, but it was. Far too much champagne to drink, in the knowledge that there were sleeping bags to huddle in in the farmhouse when we’d had enough. Tripping over youngsters around the farmyard doing what youngsters do when “excited”. None of us cared about the world collapsing, as John had a large genny running around the back of the barn, we would be alright.
The world didn’t end though, although some of us wished it had. I remember the next day groggily helping John dispose of suspect fag ends and discarded underwear…..
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April 12, 2015 at 3:07 am -
My enduring memory of the millennium was watching Blair and company standing in the millennium dome doing the cross-hand-shake to “All you need is love (DA DA DA-DA-DA)”.
Mostly because I felt like putting my foot through the TV screen.
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April 12, 2015 at 10:46 am -
They played “All You Need is Love”? OMG!! I never knew. They really were creating the village then?
https://youtu.be/d0NPodmP3TU?t=1m58s
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April 12, 2015 at 4:09 am -
Gerry Anderson could predict nowt. As I recall, my form teacher Mr Thomas, (c1972) explained we would be the leisure generation. What happened to that prediction? From my perspective, we work harder with longer hours…… Where are the jaunty robots doing stuff?
On new years eve 1999, I was drinking at the local fire station. My wife’s sister was married to a fireman so we tagged along. We never saw the culmination as we had to relieve the baby sitter. Anyway, the world continued to turn and my digital watch remained digital. Happy days. So much for the digit of DOOM.
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April 12, 2015 at 10:15 am -
In a former life I was a Software Tester and in 1999 I was just coming to end of a contract at ICL working on that system that scans your password every time you go through immigration. The job came to an end and I was looking for another contract. Rates were through the roof and everyone with half a brain and at least one arm and leg was dumping their jobs to freelance in Y2K testing.
I studiously avoided Y2K. In fact I was offered a rather well paid role at BA and when I discovered ti was Y2K testing, I turned it down. Why? Well, I figured that on the 1st January 2000 the world and his cat would be looking for the next contract and any tester withY2K on his CV was going straight into the bin while they looked at people like me who avoided it and had a steady track record in testing anything but. How right I was.
I did alright but lots of people I know got into serious financial difficulties because their income vanished overnight. Literally!
Incidentally, did you ever come across any software that actually stopped working on 1/1/00? Strangely, I did. I kept my company accounts on a system called Pegasus that was written in basic. It stopped working, so I set the date back to 31/12/99 while I wrote an alternative. Simples…
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April 12, 2015 at 10:42 am -
It seems to me that some folk made extreme amounts of money on a scare that never transpied.
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April 14, 2015 at 10:26 am -
Rather like John Galt, I was required to stay sober and log on to “the systems” at midnight because the world was expected to end.
It didn’t, as we know; nothing happened whatever, as we “people who knew” had known all along, but we were over-ruled by panicked managers. My employer had a massive “Y2K command center” built and manned at its head office, with dozens of people all ready to cope with the wave of disaster that was going to roll round the world with the clock. All a waste, needless to say. The director responsible left “by mutual agreement” a couple of months later.
I dread to think what the whole exercise cost the company; each and every one of us working in IT (and there were thousands) got a 10% bonus in 1997, 15% in 1998, and 20% in 1999 – just so that we wouldn’t leave, as the ptb were convinced there’d be a rush for skilled people as the magic date approached. They were wrong again, but the money was nice.
A classic millenarian scare, in fact.
The resonances with “global warming” are irresistible – except that this scare doesn’t have a fixed ending date, so the nutters and rent-seekers will keep it going for quite a while yet; again – from their point of view – the money is no doubt nice.
Such larks.
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April 18, 2015 at 4:27 pm -
Sorry everyone, but Y2K was a real problem – fortunately it was largely (but not entirely) fixed. See this: http://fm2x.com/The_Century_Date_Change_Problem.pdf
Here’s a recent, although harmless, example: http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2012/11/15/Woman-105-invited-to-preschool/81261353006244/
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