How Y2K Destroyed My Life
Me on television in first week of 2000. Sorry about the turtleneck.
It’s nearing midnight on Friday, December 31, 1999, and I know nothing is going to happen in a few minutes.
I’m sitting alone, feet up, in my home office surrounded on three sides by humming computer monitors. I have an unopened beer waiting on my desk.
Since the mid-1990s, I’ve been employed by the Canadian federal government as a Computer Systems Analyst and am one of their first ever “tele-work” employees.
At this momentous moment in human history, I’ve spent the entire last day of 1999 monitoring computer news from around the world, waking up at 6am to witness Australia at their midnight flipping to the Year 2000 with no issues, then continuing through every time zone around the world towards us.
Every tiny computer blip made the news, but all were minor and most were not even connected to the year-date. Journalists, aching for a big story, were so sadly disappointed: no news is NOT good news. I find myself muttering “I told you so,” to myself.
My bosses, 3000 kilometres away in Ottawa at National Headquarters of Computer Systems of the Government of Canada, don’t yet know my Y2K secret.
I’m sitting alone, feet up, in my home office surrounded on three sides by humming computer monitors. I have an unopened beer waiting on my desk.
Since the mid-1990s, I’ve been employed by the Canadian federal government as a Computer Systems Analyst and am one of their first ever “tele-work” employees.
At this momentous moment in human history, I’ve spent the entire last day of 1999 monitoring computer news from around the world, waking up at 6am to witness Australia at their midnight flipping to the Year 2000 with no issues, then continuing through every time zone around the world towards us.
Every tiny computer blip made the news, but all were minor and most were not even connected to the year-date. Journalists, aching for a big story, were so sadly disappointed: no news is NOT good news. I find myself muttering “I told you so,” to myself.
My bosses, 3000 kilometres away in Ottawa at National Headquarters of Computer Systems of the Government of Canada, don’t yet know my Y2K secret.
"Surviving Y2K" podcast
Dan Taberski created a season of podcasts on how Y2K personally affected a varied group of people. I was one of them. (dantaberski.com)
This 22-minute video is a compilation of my interview clips distilled from the 8-hour series.
My infamous 1997-99 website
In 1997, I anonymously created this website at home in the evening while I spent my days supposedly fixing the "Y2K bug." It grew beyond any expectation.
Now, inexplicably, 24 years after losing control of it, the website in still on the internet:
angelfire.com/oh/justanumber/
angelfire.com/oh/justanumber/
the commentary that got me fired in January 2000
I took off my anonymous mask in the first week of January 2000 and did a public media blitz, the highlight being a nationwide newspaper commentary on January 6, 2000.
