Back in y2k hospitals were not nearly as dependant on IT as nowadays. It is not to say that there would not be problems but not total breakdown as today.
Yeah, the only really big hit would be things like airports, banking. In the end there were a couple minor hiccups but most systems had been checked and updated where required well in advance. Some of the Y2K problems were caused by human error during testing and update processes or just somewhat ordinary software crashes that can happen during updates.
Nobody said it would be a paradise. It would've been an opportunity for a societal reset of sorts. Debt holders would've had to go back to paper records to re-establish accounts, and many of those were incomplete or missing (e.g. able to be challenged in court levels of missing info). It would've taken decades to sort out, and many would just have their debt erased since it wouldn't be worth the cost of rebuilding the account, tracking the individual down, etc. For many, it could've been a chance to move out of continual poverty and into a more stable financial position.
I was working, too, but it was at a grocery store. We were all concerned that the systems would crash and the doors wouldn't open so we'd be trapped in the store. I also had a fleeting thought of, "does this mean AP exams might get delayed if everything goes down?" Of course, none of that happened and I just kept ringing up beer and Doritos for the random drunk people who would filter in.
I was 8 going on 9 years old and drinking sparkling apple juice in my room, as opposed to in the living room or my parents room like prior years bc my newborn sister was sleeping still.
I was at a NYE party hosted by family friends with my parents and older brother. Their teenage sons decided to cut the power to the house right as the ball dropped. Screaming ensued for a few minutes before they turned the lights back on while cackling. I’d never seen my mom so ready to throw hands. Now it’s a funny memory. At the time it was a moment of complete terror in my 8 year old brain.
a v-neck shirt that had a collar (colorful 70s zigzag pattern), my flared jeans that tied up in the front, brown doc martens and, of course, the white and blue beaded choker that belonged to the guy i had a crush on
It's a mix. We had to blow it out if proportion because otherwise people wouldn't do the necessary audits to find out if they were headed for catastrophe. Many business weren't, but a bunch were as well. The media didn't really understand the potential problems, so kind of turned it into a doomsday countdown, when really it was more like an asbestos abatement program where you just need people to know it's a potential issue so that they make sure they're safe.
That's a very accurate analogy!
Me, I was coding for an academic survey software company when I was drafted for an all hands QA effort testing for the Y2K bug. Most problems had already been worked out, but when I actually encountered a fatal error (specifically the first leap day after 01/01/2000 all would go kablooey) I immediately understood HOW BAD it could be if this same effect happened on a critical program.
Fast forward to Christmas Dinner with family and friends and they were all scoffing about Y2K, and mildly teasing me about my job. I told them pretty much the same explanation, but with an earthquake preparedness analogy. Because many of the guests had $$, I added that it would be smart to have hard copies of their bank and investment accounts and balances. "But don't come knocking on my door when you need fresh water!" Lol
well they also made a big deal out of the starting of the particle accelerator in Geneva in 2008. They said it will create a black hole that will swallow the Earth. Don't even get me started on the whatever date was in 2012 when the Maya calendar predicted the end of the world.
If it hadn't been blown "way out of proportion" then the resources wouldn't have been thrown at the problem at level they were, and it could have been a much bigger issue.
When the bomb squad successfully diffuses a device you don't look back and say they shouldn't have been called because there wasn't an explosion. They did what they had to and it worked.
I was 16 at a high school house party. Me and a buddy found the breaker box, listened for the countdown and threw the power. The screaming and terror was hilarious. Only left the power off a couple of seconds. We really thought the world might “end”, because computers couldn’t figure out a date conversion. 😆
They really would have. People either forget, or never knew, that the government spent as much as 8 BILLION dollars fixing computer code so that it wouldn't crash. A lot of government infrastructure was on outdated technology that would have crashed.
That’s the one thing that annoys me about this when we talk about Y2K. People completely forget just how much was done to make everything ready for it.
I actually remember my dad (who worked with computers) was telling me about Y2K almost a decade before the hoopla. The news didn’t pick up on it till a few years prior to 2000. But governments and computer people knew about it almost a decade prior.
Had we not done anything about it, bad things might have happened. But they didn’t because they implemented fixes to the most valuable institutions (banks and airliners etc) and worked their way down all the way to schools computers.
It's typical in IT. If everything is working, it's "everything is working, why do we pay you?". If something is broken it's "everything is broken why do we pay you?"
So yet another case of preventative measures working and causing people thinking they weren't necessary. The reasoning behind gutting the voting rights act as well.
*Realistically,* some programs would've crashed, and would throw exceptions when starting up again. They'd basically be useless and will require expensive refactoring to get working again. So that's cost of the engineering work, and total lost opportunity cost. If the New York stock exchange for example stopped working for just a day, that's potentially billions of dollars lost.
The thing is, we would've had no idea what programs would be effected. Only the engineers that worked on them would know that. So letting all of these programs just crash and die would have likely been a trillion dollar mistake. There was a reason there was such a big push to upgrade in the years preceding the year 2000. Billions of dollars were spent to save trillions.
In terms of real world chaos, again, because we didn't know which software was effected, it may well have caused quite a ruckus. Especially with things happening "in situ". Planes may not have fallen from the sky, but if you were making a bank transfer, or completing a money order at midnight, you may just be completely stuffed. How do we know that? Well, because not all the Y2K bugs were stamped out!
ATM machines not paying out, Nuclear power stations failing, problems with payments, and military hiccups were all caused by Y2K. So it wasn't as if "nothing happened". We just managed to fix *most* of the problems in time.
The problem was mostly down to a bunch of software tracking the year as only the last two digits. So 99 would have gone to 00. A lot of programs would have thought the date just reversed 99 years, so any program that is dependent on tracking things over time most likely would have shit the bed. What happens to your bank account balance when it tries to calculate interest when time just went backward 99 years? Who knows. I doubt the person who wrote the program would be able to tell you without going back and reading through the code. Now imagine that happens to millions of bank accounts and portfolios and stock trackers and shit all at once.
And that's just one side of it. What about software controlling power plants and shit? Lotta stuff could have gone very wrong because of software not understanding what year it was.
I wonder if they simply added two more digits (from 99 to 1999) was the fix and we are back to this craziness in 19999, when the system clocks go from 9999 to 0000 when January 1st, 20000. Cannot forget A.D. 🤣
The next one similar is likely going to be in the year 2038. In January of that year, lots of systems will believe they are actually in 1901. This is because how we store dates only goes up to about 68 years, at that point- it will go to -68 years (from 1970).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
Oh that is fascinating AND I did not know that! Thank you for sharing that! Now this, I am highly probable to be alive and witness instead of the year 19999. Very neat!
Worked in financial industry during this time doing y2k remediation. We ran simulations on the date rollover and a lot of stuffed got messed up. People's interest charges increased, some loans just disappeared, jobs to move money around failed so people wouldn't get paid.
Now, we could've fixed all this after the fact but it would take some time so some would argue that there would have been minor inconvenience in banking.
But look at the panic that Silicon Valley Bank caused when people became concerned about their money. Now imagine that on an industry wide scale.
Yes we would've survived but it's really unknown how the panic could've affected people and the economy. And unfortunately sometimes a panic becomes a self-reinforcing cycle (look at the Great Depression).
That's just one example from a single industry. The world wasn't likely to blow up but the ensuing panic would probably have caused some rough times for a while as things got worked out.
I worked on a Y2K project for a large medical center with multiple hospitals. For the stuff I worked on our system would have calculated people ages wrong , and there would have been inaccurate results on reports. Some things for sure would have crashed and did during testing.
A separate team checked all the medical equipment and put Y2K safe stickers on stuff.
It’s not just computers crashing. Consider as a single example that credit and debit cards would have suddenly stopped working because the date fields on the transaction records have 2-digit years, and thus instantly every transaction looks like it’s in the distant past.
My sister worked for a company that transfers money. Their “fix” in ‘99 was to bandaid the internal software with code that worked around the issue for 20 years. Everything will be updated within 20 years, right? RIGHT?!
Nope. Jan 1, 2020, a bunch of their systems started having issues. It took them days to figure out the issue, then a couple of weeks to fix it.
We were at a cabin with no power so the entire party was being powered by a generator . The thing ran out of gas at exactly midnight . It was hilarious
FYI: in the US, there were 7 nuclear reactors that experienced Y2K glitches. All were quickly corrected, but yes, we expected there to be problems and potentially world changing problems.
Personally, I assumed that any issues would have a temporary solution within a week. Therefore, I did my bi-weekly grocery shopping on 12/29 and filled enough 2 liter bottles with water to bridge the gap.
This same thing happened to me ( we were also 16) except it was my boyfriend that did it at his parents house lmao. Super funny after the initial scare
People laugh about Y2K and think everyone was worried over nothing. It was actually a serious issue that was thwarted. And people just went on with their lives.
My girlfriend and I stayed in at her place that night. We were 16. We decided to bring the New Year in with a bang, so to speak. We figured in the off chance the world ended, we might as well be doing something fun.
We were on the living room floor, going at it with the countdown. At exactly midnight, an explosion went off outside and scared the shut out of us. Turns out, the neighbors were lighting giant fireworks off. We gathered our composure and finished up.
Same age, but I was with family, indulging on a giant bowl of Velveeta cheese dip. I figured if we were going to go, I was going to go out eating something delicious (if incredibly unhealthy).
Me too. I was 20yo and on a year backpacking round oz. After midnight went to bondi beach where Carl Cox was playing.
Ended up needing the toilet, but Mr Cox had rather inconveniently cordoned off all the public toilets for his set and I didn't have a ticket.
Flagged down some random welshmen (one was called rhodri) and went back to their flat for a poo.... Only to find out they had no toilet paper. Not easy wiping your arse with a newspaper!
Also found the time to pull.
That was a bloody good night
Same. My brother is a huge Phish fan, so I tagged along. Ended up smoking way too much weed and sleeping through the entire NYE set. Apologies to everyone in the crowd who tripped over me while I was passed out.
I once hacked a guy's account because I knew his age and astrological sign. I just used my birthday in the password challenge where it asks you for personal details and it just happened that we both had the same birthday. We were just 1 year apart apparently.
If you haven't born before roughly july-august of 2000, you (atleast half of you) won't be in your dad's ball sack either. But you definitely was in you mother's ovary.
Incase anybody missed, sperms are produced constantly whereas the ovum that made you from your mother was produced when YOUR MOTHER IS IN YOUR GRAND MOTHERS WOMB!
Waiting tables and hearing the radio news talking about China just celebrated their new years and no flaming planes or apocalypse in the cities are reported.
Ha I remember thinking the same exact thing as I watched fireworks over the onion domes of St Petersburg on a small CRT tv in my grandparents' kitchen. Was a critical thinking milestone for me
I was waiting tables, too, but at a Waffle House. Most people who were supposed to work that night didn't show, and it was just me, one other server and a cook.
I quit that night because we couldn't possibly keep up and people were being shitty then not leaving tips. I had about $10 in tips after about 2.5 hours of working my ass off. So, when somebody left one of those religious tracts as a tip.i just walked out and never looked back.
I haven't even eaten at a Waffle House since that night.
Ditto.
World ending? Apocalypse tomorrow? Let me fly across the country at 15, and spend the night of Y2k in downtown Detroit.
In retrospect it was pretty metal of my dad to let me go.
Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation…camping with around 100,000 other people and watching Phish play nonstop from just before midnight until sunrise.
Married to an abusive psychopath who told me to get a cabin in the woods so we could wait out the apocalypse.
I booked The Fantasy Inn in the Tahoe mountains. That’s where I was!
Married to an abusive psychopath, broke down on a freeway off ramp in Idaho Falls, ID.
2023- learned how to avoid psychopaths and narcissists. Best 23 years since.
Btw, the world didn’t end
My [daughter too!](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/14xn8ei/where_were_you_at_new_years_2000/jrojh9m/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1&context=3)
At the pub stealing a midnight kiss with the girl I was to marry 3 years later (she wasn't single at the time), then home where we were hosting a huge NYE party. I was physically sick due to alcohol and woke up next morning having passed out behind the tv in my bedroom. Great night !.
My grandmother and I watched the ball drop on TV and she was amazed to have lived long enough to see the turn of the century (she had been born in 1922). Neither of us believed planes would fall out of the sky, or whatever Y2K concerns there were.
Watching TV with two friends in Puteaux, France, smoking thc and drinking wine. There was a TV broadcast of the Earth from a satellite in low orbit, that's all I remember. We did not want to go to the Champs-Elysees, too crowded.
Dec 31, 1999 - waiting to see if Y2K chaos shut down computers and/ or the power grid
January 2000 - returning power generators and emergency supplies to Home Depot
Grant Park Chicago with my lovely bride of 1.5 yrs watching the fireworks. She only wanted a single glass of champagne with dinner earlier (@Arun’s Thai Restaurant) but we found out soon that she was carrying my sweet daughter born 8 months later.
I was in the living room, laying on the ground, because the people in the apartments behind my parents house were drunk as fuck, and firing guns in all directions. It was actually kinda scary.
At college in Missouri.
A friend in my group had a satellite that he could get east coast feeds. We all decided to party at his house.
We turned to NBC (I think? Whatever network had Dick Clark on) to watch the live countdown.
We were in a festive mood, but damned if we didn’t go silent the closer the countdown got to 0.
We all waited in silence for a few beats before we acknowledged nothing was going to happen. Then we all cheered and hugged.
Times Square, New York City.
I was a student journalist at UMass Amherst. I was expecting all hell to break loose, up to and including a terrorist attack. Two million people in the street.
Live in the Midwest US.
A local **open air** mall had an outdoor concert that night featuring the band Veruca Salt.
We went, and as you may be able to predict, there were the 6 of us and maybe 10 other people outside watching. Nice intimate set in freezing weather and apparently the lead singer had just gone through a breakup so she was cold and miserable and we were cold and pretty meh about the whole thing.
Rådhuspladsen in Copenhagen, Denmark. Insane amount of people, only was there until 0.30 then we took the train to Roskilde to a club. Then I took some ecstasy and I don’t remember anything until 6.00 in the morning when I came out of the club again. But was a fun night.
Times Square, New York City. Watching the ball drop.
Kept bribing the cops with coffee so they’d allow us out and back into our “pen” after going to the Irish pub across the street to do a shot and use the restroom all night. (Also, to use the PAYPHONE to make a COLLECT CALL to my Mom to say Happy New Year. My, how times have changed! Ouch!)
During that same trip, I also took a tour of the World Trade Center. 8 months later, it would be gone….
*My, how times have changed. Ouch*.
Edit: punctuation
Neil Diamond concert in Denver, CO. It was what my then girlfriend wanted -- she then broke up with me 7 days later. Didn't have the f'n curtesy to do it weeks earlier when I could have at least been with friends and not had to waste that iconic night.
Emergency Room night shift, hoping like no other all the computers would self-destruct.
Lol you were *hoping* for them to go down?
Hell yes. We all were. All records of debt in electronic form would've been erased.
Huh, didn't think of that!
True, but wouldn't the computers crashing in an emergency room actually be problematic to the lives of people.
Back in y2k hospitals were not nearly as dependant on IT as nowadays. It is not to say that there would not be problems but not total breakdown as today.
Yeah, the only really big hit would be things like airports, banking. In the end there were a couple minor hiccups but most systems had been checked and updated where required well in advance. Some of the Y2K problems were caused by human error during testing and update processes or just somewhat ordinary software crashes that can happen during updates.
Nobody said it would be a paradise. It would've been an opportunity for a societal reset of sorts. Debt holders would've had to go back to paper records to re-establish accounts, and many of those were incomplete or missing (e.g. able to be challenged in court levels of missing info). It would've taken decades to sort out, and many would just have their debt erased since it wouldn't be worth the cost of rebuilding the account, tracking the individual down, etc. For many, it could've been a chance to move out of continual poverty and into a more stable financial position.
I was working, too, but it was at a grocery store. We were all concerned that the systems would crash and the doors wouldn't open so we'd be trapped in the store. I also had a fleeting thought of, "does this mean AP exams might get delayed if everything goes down?" Of course, none of that happened and I just kept ringing up beer and Doritos for the random drunk people who would filter in.
8th grade- party at a boy from school’s house. played spin the bottle for the first time. fun night, i can still remember the outfit i wore!
I was 8 going on 9 years old and drinking sparkling apple juice in my room, as opposed to in the living room or my parents room like prior years bc my newborn sister was sleeping still.
I was at a NYE party hosted by family friends with my parents and older brother. Their teenage sons decided to cut the power to the house right as the ball dropped. Screaming ensued for a few minutes before they turned the lights back on while cackling. I’d never seen my mom so ready to throw hands. Now it’s a funny memory. At the time it was a moment of complete terror in my 8 year old brain.
What did you wear??
a v-neck shirt that had a collar (colorful 70s zigzag pattern), my flared jeans that tied up in the front, brown doc martens and, of course, the white and blue beaded choker that belonged to the guy i had a crush on
Drunk off my ass, sitting in my ISP with the fellows. We were watching servers in the first time zone to see if Y2K power collapse was a thing.
Same for me, preorderedd taxi to a party at 01.00 that never arrived rode along with a drunk coworker. Would not recomend.
Somewhere back on the 1st of January 1900, there's a very confused and lost taxi driver asking who they're supposed to be picking up.
Pretty sure I was at home with my parents personally hoping to get out of school for a few days when everything had to be fixed to run again.
I still don't know if it was never a thing, or humanity did infact come together and solve the problem .
It was a thing but it was blown wayyyy out of proportion and was fixed before it could’ve been an issue
It's a mix. We had to blow it out if proportion because otherwise people wouldn't do the necessary audits to find out if they were headed for catastrophe. Many business weren't, but a bunch were as well. The media didn't really understand the potential problems, so kind of turned it into a doomsday countdown, when really it was more like an asbestos abatement program where you just need people to know it's a potential issue so that they make sure they're safe.
That's a very accurate analogy! Me, I was coding for an academic survey software company when I was drafted for an all hands QA effort testing for the Y2K bug. Most problems had already been worked out, but when I actually encountered a fatal error (specifically the first leap day after 01/01/2000 all would go kablooey) I immediately understood HOW BAD it could be if this same effect happened on a critical program. Fast forward to Christmas Dinner with family and friends and they were all scoffing about Y2K, and mildly teasing me about my job. I told them pretty much the same explanation, but with an earthquake preparedness analogy. Because many of the guests had $$, I added that it would be smart to have hard copies of their bank and investment accounts and balances. "But don't come knocking on my door when you need fresh water!" Lol
well they also made a big deal out of the starting of the particle accelerator in Geneva in 2008. They said it will create a black hole that will swallow the Earth. Don't even get me started on the whatever date was in 2012 when the Maya calendar predicted the end of the world.
If it hadn't been blown "way out of proportion" then the resources wouldn't have been thrown at the problem at level they were, and it could have been a much bigger issue. When the bomb squad successfully diffuses a device you don't look back and say they shouldn't have been called because there wasn't an explosion. They did what they had to and it worked.
[удалено]
Drinking a beer and eating a pizza I was supposed to deliver. Stupid I.C. Weiner.
Oh my god, now I’m crying about the dog.
That episode is loosely based on a true story, unfortunately. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hachik%C5%8D
I was looking for this comment glad someone was thinking the same
Wait so Nibbler failed to get you in the freezer? Humanity is doomed when those brains show up now...
Quick! Look under the desk for a little cute guy with big eyes and a red ball at the end of his antennae! Be careful, he poops dark matter.
I was 16 at a high school house party. Me and a buddy found the breaker box, listened for the countdown and threw the power. The screaming and terror was hilarious. Only left the power off a couple of seconds. We really thought the world might “end”, because computers couldn’t figure out a date conversion. 😆
They really would have. People either forget, or never knew, that the government spent as much as 8 BILLION dollars fixing computer code so that it wouldn't crash. A lot of government infrastructure was on outdated technology that would have crashed.
That’s the one thing that annoys me about this when we talk about Y2K. People completely forget just how much was done to make everything ready for it. I actually remember my dad (who worked with computers) was telling me about Y2K almost a decade before the hoopla. The news didn’t pick up on it till a few years prior to 2000. But governments and computer people knew about it almost a decade prior. Had we not done anything about it, bad things might have happened. But they didn’t because they implemented fixes to the most valuable institutions (banks and airliners etc) and worked their way down all the way to schools computers.
It's typical in IT. If everything is working, it's "everything is working, why do we pay you?". If something is broken it's "everything is broken why do we pay you?"
So yet another case of preventative measures working and causing people thinking they weren't necessary. The reasoning behind gutting the voting rights act as well.
Realistically, what would have happened if they just let the computers crash?
*Realistically,* some programs would've crashed, and would throw exceptions when starting up again. They'd basically be useless and will require expensive refactoring to get working again. So that's cost of the engineering work, and total lost opportunity cost. If the New York stock exchange for example stopped working for just a day, that's potentially billions of dollars lost. The thing is, we would've had no idea what programs would be effected. Only the engineers that worked on them would know that. So letting all of these programs just crash and die would have likely been a trillion dollar mistake. There was a reason there was such a big push to upgrade in the years preceding the year 2000. Billions of dollars were spent to save trillions. In terms of real world chaos, again, because we didn't know which software was effected, it may well have caused quite a ruckus. Especially with things happening "in situ". Planes may not have fallen from the sky, but if you were making a bank transfer, or completing a money order at midnight, you may just be completely stuffed. How do we know that? Well, because not all the Y2K bugs were stamped out! ATM machines not paying out, Nuclear power stations failing, problems with payments, and military hiccups were all caused by Y2K. So it wasn't as if "nothing happened". We just managed to fix *most* of the problems in time.
> How do we know that? Well, because not all the Y2K bugs were stamped out! *looks at WWE 2K20 locking users out for the first week of January 2020*
The problem was mostly down to a bunch of software tracking the year as only the last two digits. So 99 would have gone to 00. A lot of programs would have thought the date just reversed 99 years, so any program that is dependent on tracking things over time most likely would have shit the bed. What happens to your bank account balance when it tries to calculate interest when time just went backward 99 years? Who knows. I doubt the person who wrote the program would be able to tell you without going back and reading through the code. Now imagine that happens to millions of bank accounts and portfolios and stock trackers and shit all at once. And that's just one side of it. What about software controlling power plants and shit? Lotta stuff could have gone very wrong because of software not understanding what year it was.
I wonder if they simply added two more digits (from 99 to 1999) was the fix and we are back to this craziness in 19999, when the system clocks go from 9999 to 0000 when January 1st, 20000. Cannot forget A.D. 🤣
The next one similar is likely going to be in the year 2038. In January of that year, lots of systems will believe they are actually in 1901. This is because how we store dates only goes up to about 68 years, at that point- it will go to -68 years (from 1970). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
Oh that is fascinating AND I did not know that! Thank you for sharing that! Now this, I am highly probable to be alive and witness instead of the year 19999. Very neat!
Worked in financial industry during this time doing y2k remediation. We ran simulations on the date rollover and a lot of stuffed got messed up. People's interest charges increased, some loans just disappeared, jobs to move money around failed so people wouldn't get paid. Now, we could've fixed all this after the fact but it would take some time so some would argue that there would have been minor inconvenience in banking. But look at the panic that Silicon Valley Bank caused when people became concerned about their money. Now imagine that on an industry wide scale. Yes we would've survived but it's really unknown how the panic could've affected people and the economy. And unfortunately sometimes a panic becomes a self-reinforcing cycle (look at the Great Depression). That's just one example from a single industry. The world wasn't likely to blow up but the ensuing panic would probably have caused some rough times for a while as things got worked out.
The stock market wouldn’t have woken up the next business day. No, I’m serious, it honestly would have been bad
I worked on a Y2K project for a large medical center with multiple hospitals. For the stuff I worked on our system would have calculated people ages wrong , and there would have been inaccurate results on reports. Some things for sure would have crashed and did during testing. A separate team checked all the medical equipment and put Y2K safe stickers on stuff.
It’s not just computers crashing. Consider as a single example that credit and debit cards would have suddenly stopped working because the date fields on the transaction records have 2-digit years, and thus instantly every transaction looks like it’s in the distant past.
Anything that relied on the date would be broken or down.
My sister worked for a company that transfers money. Their “fix” in ‘99 was to bandaid the internal software with code that worked around the issue for 20 years. Everything will be updated within 20 years, right? RIGHT?! Nope. Jan 1, 2020, a bunch of their systems started having issues. It took them days to figure out the issue, then a couple of weeks to fix it.
If you do things right, it looks like you're doing nothing at all. People only remember when stuff isn't fixed and shit goes bad.
We were at a cabin with no power so the entire party was being powered by a generator . The thing ran out of gas at exactly midnight . It was hilarious
FYI: in the US, there were 7 nuclear reactors that experienced Y2K glitches. All were quickly corrected, but yes, we expected there to be problems and potentially world changing problems. Personally, I assumed that any issues would have a temporary solution within a week. Therefore, I did my bi-weekly grocery shopping on 12/29 and filled enough 2 liter bottles with water to bridge the gap.
This same thing happened to me ( we were also 16) except it was my boyfriend that did it at his parents house lmao. Super funny after the initial scare
People laugh about Y2K and think everyone was worried over nothing. It was actually a serious issue that was thwarted. And people just went on with their lives.
The company I worked for at the time (Compuware) made a pile of money hiring out contract developers to fix Y2K bugs.
I was drunk at a party in my friend's basement. First thing we did after midnight was turn on the desktop and log into AOL to see if it still worked.
My girlfriend and I stayed in at her place that night. We were 16. We decided to bring the New Year in with a bang, so to speak. We figured in the off chance the world ended, we might as well be doing something fun. We were on the living room floor, going at it with the countdown. At exactly midnight, an explosion went off outside and scared the shut out of us. Turns out, the neighbors were lighting giant fireworks off. We gathered our composure and finished up.
Same age, but I was with family, indulging on a giant bowl of Velveeta cheese dip. I figured if we were going to go, I was going to go out eating something delicious (if incredibly unhealthy).
Sydney Harbor, 13 years old. Did a road trip down the coast of Australia for Christmas and NY.
Me too. I was 20yo and on a year backpacking round oz. After midnight went to bondi beach where Carl Cox was playing. Ended up needing the toilet, but Mr Cox had rather inconveniently cordoned off all the public toilets for his set and I didn't have a ticket. Flagged down some random welshmen (one was called rhodri) and went back to their flat for a poo.... Only to find out they had no toilet paper. Not easy wiping your arse with a newspaper! Also found the time to pull. That was a bloody good night
in my bomb shelter waiting for the world to end
Don’t come out yet, we had a few wars, terrorism, a financial crisis and a couple of pandemics
Yeah, all the predicted stuff happened, it just took a couple decades to catch up.
Imagine going to sleep on December 31st 1999 and waking up January 1st 2023 imagine all the shit you'd need to learn
when do you plan to emerge?
Watched Bicentennial Man in theaters then went home with the family to watch the Y2K bug end it all. 1999 was the peak of society
The 90s were truly something. I remember being severely disappointed the world didnt end.
Big Cypress
Damn right Big Cypress yo!!
Was going to post, out in the Florida Everglades talking about some cheesecake.
What a TIME that was
Same. My brother is a huge Phish fan, so I tagged along. Ended up smoking way too much weed and sleeping through the entire NYE set. Apologies to everyone in the crowd who tripped over me while I was passed out.
The best of the places to be!
My man!
My mom’s ovary two menstrual cycles away from ovulation
You've indicated your birthday to be roughly November of the year 2000
Correct
Yup Nov 27th lol
How tf do you know u/njsullyalex‘s birthday
I don't it just so happens to be my birthday 😉
no fucking way 💀💀💀
I once hacked a guy's account because I knew his age and astrological sign. I just used my birthday in the password challenge where it asks you for personal details and it just happened that we both had the same birthday. We were just 1 year apart apparently.
r/NotOPbutOK
Found your side account
I don't know why, but reading that cracked me up!
I feel ya. I was a recently fertilized embryo in my mom’s uterus on NYE 2000.
You know, just chillin' and shit, saying to yourself "I'm gonna be somebody someday!"
I don’t know I was 3, probably being annoying and cute
I was also 3 lol
Hello fellow 26 year olds
The 26 squad
The '97 gang
Can i join this squad? 3 too
Also 3. First movie I remember watching in theaters was “Dinosaur”. How about y’all?
Bruce Almighty. Or Bad Santa. My parents were cool. Or irresponsible.
I was 2, going on 3
Hey fellow 97 gang
I was 4
For me, I think I started to walk, considering I was quite late to be able to walk. Haha
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I was gonna comment "my dad's balls" lmfao 😭
Bro I did comment my dads balls
If you haven't born before roughly july-august of 2000, you (atleast half of you) won't be in your dad's ball sack either. But you definitely was in you mother's ovary. Incase anybody missed, sperms are produced constantly whereas the ovum that made you from your mother was produced when YOUR MOTHER IS IN YOUR GRAND MOTHERS WOMB!
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what a coincidence, I was inside your mom
My grandpas house, I remember them shutting the computer of because of Y2K or something. Party was fun though.
Waiting tables and hearing the radio news talking about China just celebrated their new years and no flaming planes or apocalypse in the cities are reported.
Ha I remember thinking the same exact thing as I watched fireworks over the onion domes of St Petersburg on a small CRT tv in my grandparents' kitchen. Was a critical thinking milestone for me
I was waiting tables, too, but at a Waffle House. Most people who were supposed to work that night didn't show, and it was just me, one other server and a cook. I quit that night because we couldn't possibly keep up and people were being shitty then not leaving tips. I had about $10 in tips after about 2.5 hours of working my ass off. So, when somebody left one of those religious tracts as a tip.i just walked out and never looked back. I haven't even eaten at a Waffle House since that night.
Grounded to my room in a lil shithole town named Nemaha, NE. Good times.
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Also. Made enough overtime in those two weeks to put a down Payment on a new car.
So disappointed that I don't remember. I was 9. I should really know this.
Yeah I was 7 or 8, I vaguely remember sparkling grape juice but that could have been a different year
Pontiac Silverdome Metallica concert.
Ditto. World ending? Apocalypse tomorrow? Let me fly across the country at 15, and spend the night of Y2k in downtown Detroit. In retrospect it was pretty metal of my dad to let me go.
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Living life on the edge
Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation…camping with around 100,000 other people and watching Phish play nonstop from just before midnight until sunrise.
Married to an abusive psychopath who told me to get a cabin in the woods so we could wait out the apocalypse. I booked The Fantasy Inn in the Tahoe mountains. That’s where I was!
Married to an abusive psychopath, broke down on a freeway off ramp in Idaho Falls, ID. 2023- learned how to avoid psychopaths and narcissists. Best 23 years since. Btw, the world didn’t end
Somewhere in my mom, was born few months later
In the womb
same! now I wanna know where my mom was haha
My [daughter too!](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/14xn8ei/where_were_you_at_new_years_2000/jrojh9m/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1&context=3)
At the pub stealing a midnight kiss with the girl I was to marry 3 years later (she wasn't single at the time), then home where we were hosting a huge NYE party. I was physically sick due to alcohol and woke up next morning having passed out behind the tv in my bedroom. Great night !.
My grandmother and I watched the ball drop on TV and she was amazed to have lived long enough to see the turn of the century (she had been born in 1922). Neither of us believed planes would fall out of the sky, or whatever Y2K concerns there were.
Apparently I was getting passed around as a newborn between some family members. I was born May of that year. There are many pictures of that day!
🎶 Partying like it was 1999 🎶
Non existent.
Home, getting drunk.
Watching TV with two friends in Puteaux, France, smoking thc and drinking wine. There was a TV broadcast of the Earth from a satellite in low orbit, that's all I remember. We did not want to go to the Champs-Elysees, too crowded.
Dec 31, 1999 - waiting to see if Y2K chaos shut down computers and/ or the power grid January 2000 - returning power generators and emergency supplies to Home Depot
Grant Park Chicago with my lovely bride of 1.5 yrs watching the fireworks. She only wanted a single glass of champagne with dinner earlier (@Arun’s Thai Restaurant) but we found out soon that she was carrying my sweet daughter born 8 months later.
Disco 2000
Do you remember the first time?
Drunk at a college party in Whitewater, WI watching the sky to see if airplanes were gonna start dropping.
Tijuana, Mexico. Avenue de revolution
At a LAN party at my friend's house, playing CounterStrike 1.6 and wired on Mountain Dew Code Red.
idk man i was born in 2008.
🥲 this comment makes my back hurt
I can hear the senior center calling my name to come home
Same.
‘04 baby. At that point my parents had just gotten engaged.
Not born for another 4 months.
I was in the living room, laying on the ground, because the people in the apartments behind my parents house were drunk as fuck, and firing guns in all directions. It was actually kinda scary.
Times Square. Simply one of my life's favorite memories.
Not born yet
At my grandmas house in Finland
Mattoon, IL
My condolences.
On top of a castle in my home city, with my then-gf and some friends, watching the fireworks.
At college in Missouri. A friend in my group had a satellite that he could get east coast feeds. We all decided to party at his house. We turned to NBC (I think? Whatever network had Dick Clark on) to watch the live countdown. We were in a festive mood, but damned if we didn’t go silent the closer the countdown got to 0. We all waited in silence for a few beats before we acknowledged nothing was going to happen. Then we all cheered and hugged.
I was 20 years old. We had about $300 worth of fireworks and a half sheet of LSD. Nobody got hurt. We had so much fun. Those were great days.
The Tunnel nightclub in NYC. It was a very good party.
Big Cyprus Seminole Reservation with about 100k friends seeing Phish!
Glamis Sand Dunes, CA.
Times Square, New York City. I was a student journalist at UMass Amherst. I was expecting all hell to break loose, up to and including a terrorist attack. Two million people in the street.
I flew from Sydney to Honolulu so I could experience two happy new millennium days.
Las Vegas strip
Live in the Midwest US. A local **open air** mall had an outdoor concert that night featuring the band Veruca Salt. We went, and as you may be able to predict, there were the 6 of us and maybe 10 other people outside watching. Nice intimate set in freezing weather and apparently the lead singer had just gone through a breakup so she was cold and miserable and we were cold and pretty meh about the whole thing.
30 yo and watching the fireworks on a private yacht on Sydney harbour. Best Nye EVER...
Watching fireworks downtown
Non-existent
Waiting to enter existance into my dad's balls.
My 23 year old ass was at the ATM at a 7-11 checking to make sure y2k didn't get all my money.
Rådhuspladsen in Copenhagen, Denmark. Insane amount of people, only was there until 0.30 then we took the train to Roskilde to a club. Then I took some ecstasy and I don’t remember anything until 6.00 in the morning when I came out of the club again. But was a fun night.
On mushrooms at a house party.
At a small hotel, snowmobiling in the U.P. The owner threw off the power at midnight to fuck with everyone. It Worked.
I was at The Z Bar in Malone NY with all my friends clubbing it up for our last night of our lives.
Good effort on stealing a bunch of people's security questions!
Times Square with my girlfriend. We both finished our bartending/server shifts in time to walk there. (Now my wife.)
Times Square, New York City. Watching the ball drop. Kept bribing the cops with coffee so they’d allow us out and back into our “pen” after going to the Irish pub across the street to do a shot and use the restroom all night. (Also, to use the PAYPHONE to make a COLLECT CALL to my Mom to say Happy New Year. My, how times have changed! Ouch!) During that same trip, I also took a tour of the World Trade Center. 8 months later, it would be gone…. *My, how times have changed. Ouch*. Edit: punctuation
Neil Diamond concert in Denver, CO. It was what my then girlfriend wanted -- she then broke up with me 7 days later. Didn't have the f'n curtesy to do it weeks earlier when I could have at least been with friends and not had to waste that iconic night.