canadaland.com/podcast/was-the-y2k-bug-really-a-hoax/
Click above to listen to a 45-minute podcast produced by Canadaland Commons in November 2024.
CREDITS: Arshy Mann (host), Jordan Cornish (Producer, Mixing & Mastering), Noor Azrieh (Producer), Caleb Thompson (production support), max collins (Director of Audio), Jesse Brown (Publisher.)
WEBSITE: canadaland.com/podcast/was-the-y2k-bug-really-a-hoax/
CREDITS: Arshy Mann (host), Jordan Cornish (Producer, Mixing & Mastering), Noor Azrieh (Producer), Caleb Thompson (production support), max collins (Director of Audio), Jesse Brown (Publisher.)
WEBSITE: canadaland.com/podcast/was-the-y2k-bug-really-a-hoax/
Below is a partial transcript of the episode.
The reason I say partial is that it only includes the parts where the host and I interact. You can listen to the other guest on the podcast, but his words are not transcribed here. I disagree with most everything the other guest is promoting, so don't want to further publicize his views.
The reason I say partial is that it only includes the parts where the host and I interact. You can listen to the other guest on the podcast, but his words are not transcribed here. I disagree with most everything the other guest is promoting, so don't want to further publicize his views.
My name is David Robert Loblaw and I worked for the federal government in the public service in computer systems from 1991 till the first week of 2000.
David Robert has worn a lot of different hats in his life. In the 1980s, he worked as a writer, a researcher, an actor and even a part-time comedian. But by the late ‘80s, a lot of that work was starting to dry up.
I just met my new girlfriend and we just moved to Edmonton. I was looking for work at a file clerk job at the federal government, and I'd worked my way up and then I got interested in computers.
At that time, the World Wide Web didn't even exist. The nascent Internet was a new frontier full of possibilities. Well, there's a revolution going on in rec rooms, offices and classrooms around the world. They're sharing scientific data, arguing philosophy or passing on cooking tips and gossip, night and day through a computer network called Internet. David Robert was a part of it, spending much of his free time making websites just for the fun of it.
It was just so thrilling that the potential of the Internet in the early 90s was just such an exciting, thrilling time. Those websites were horrific in today's terms. It took you three hours to upload, but it was exciting.
And soon he was putting some of that newfound expertise to work for the federal government.
So I created this kind of this very basic website that would help people troubleshoot our equipment around the country. I had a conference in Ottawa, I showed it and they loved it. So they handpicked me right from a file clerk in Edmonton, right to national headquarters in the Government of Canada in Hull to do that. So it was this massive career jump from a file clerk, right to coding things for the mainframe of the Government of Canada was fantastic. So that was in 96 and 97 and I was thinking, this is my career, this is fantastic and reading everything about the internet, the potential of it, or even called the superhighway, the information superhighway was the goofy term in cyberspace. We're in cyberspace right now and that was such a big deal.
He was now part of teams that were helping to make the federal government more accessible to people, creating systems that allowed citizens to check on the status of their unemployment insurance or social security, the kind of stuff that makes life a little better for normal folks.
And then I would say the Y2K circus came into town, set up their tent, and everything stopped.
By then, David Robert was familiar with the Millennium Bug problem. And he says that there's no doubt that it was an issue that needed to be addressed. But it wasn't long before he saw it take over every part of his job and the jobs of everyone else around him.
Everything was Y2K. It was a major line item in every meeting. Everyone talked about it. It just took over everything. And the main thing, Y2K was real. The year 2000 bug was real. We had to check all codes and all different computer systems to see what would happen when it went to 99 to 00. Well, this was important, essential work. It can't be emphasized enough just how utterly monotonous it was. For the people on the ground. It was simple” and boring as heck. Looking for that code dates is the most dullest thing. Let's say I gave you a dictionary and sat you down at a desk with a pen and I asked you to circle every E in that dictionary. Go do that for the next six months and that's your job.
By 1998, Canadian businesses and governments were becoming increasingly panicked. A task force of senior corporate executives warned that some businesses risked going under because of Y2K glitches. Treasury Board Committee for the Federal Government had even more dire predictions. Social Security and EI checks might just stop going out. The CRA might not even be able to collect taxes. The immigration system might come to a complete halt. And fridges in government research labs holding dangerous bacteria might stop working. Leading to all kinds of potential apocalyptic scenarios. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien made it clear to his ministers that Y2K was now the priority. Everything else would have to be set aside. And that's what truly drove David Robert Loblaw up the wall. All of those important projects that he'd been working on that had been making the lives of Canadians just a little bit better, they were set aside.
We had tons of projects, everything pretty much ground to a halt, like any type of new research into any type of telephony or anything. And we had to just go through all of the old code. And I always say that, gotta say, the Y2K was a million-dollar problem that morphed into a multi-billion-dollar industry, just because of the hysteria, the fear of it.
And that's why he decided to launch the website. It was called the Year 2000 Computer Bug Hoax, a direct response to Peter's website. He ran it anonymously, because he was a federal civil servant and didn't want to run afoul of his bosses. But his purpose was to be a counterbalance to what he saw as hysteria in the media and in the government. Hysteria that he felt was caused by people like Peter. And while it was a simple site, it had the style and panache that websites from the 1990s are famous for.
Mine was at Angel Fire. And I think the front, very top had all these flames, huge flames. Then I had all my theories and a bunch of links. And it was really a bare bones kind of thing.
He was expecting maybe a few dozen people to find it. But he ended up with a much bigger audience than that.
I was expecting some friends and a couple of geeks to answer. Getting 100 emails in a day at that time was mind boggling. It was incredible. And I don't know if you remember seeing all the old websites when they had the hit counter at the bottom and then they had flowers and they were so ugly, ugly as hell. And so looking at that, I think, oh my God, you're watching in real time the hit counter. And my problem was I created the hit counter was only five digits and was getting to the 90,000s. I think I just created my own Y2K problem.
Luckily, it did in fact flip over and add an extra digit once he reached 100,000 views. Meanwhile, Peter continued to warn of impending disaster to anyone who would listen. He was writing 10 columns a month, traveled to more than 40 different countries, and he was doing media interviews with almost every free hour he had. He was also helping to build a community of IT professionals around the world to tackle the millennium bug. At one point, we had 90,000 people on a discussion group. David Robert Loblaw was also getting hate for trying to throw cold water on that very same hysteria.
And that was my most exciting part because there's people that were cursing me to hell. I got a curse on me and my family forever, which is interesting because he cursed me and then nothing happened. So, I emailed him back. I said, I'm still waiting. What do I do? There's a curse. What happened? So, I did it a couple of times and he ghosted me. But yeah, there's a lot of those emails and all the, but really sad ones too, saying, 'I'm a retired person. If the power goes out and there's no food.' There are sadder, unbelievably sad ones that I got too, which is really awful. Then there's really angry, insane ones that were just scary as all hell.
As the months went by, in December 31st, 1999, drew ever nearer. Tens of thousands of Canadians were going through millions and millions of lines of code. The federal government alone had 11,000 people working on Y2K compliance. The National Energy Board tried to ensure that their pipeline safety systems didn't shut down and cause fuel shortages. Banks gathered up enormous amounts of cash to forestall bank runs. And the Canadian military drew up contingency plans in case government services came to a halt. Thirteen thousand troops would be deployed across the country and all of them would be given enough provisions to be self-sufficient for 30 days. They called it, appropriately, Operation Abacus. When the day finally arrived, some people waited with bated breath, but not David Robert Loblaw.
So I was at home, my home office, knowing nothing was going to happen, you know, surrounded by computers, all my feeds to Ottawa, five or six different computers.
He'd already spoken to someone in Australia, which had just experienced the year change without any major problems. So he sat looking at the bare bones news websites of the time. And so at midnight, nothing happens.
Oh, I open a beer, have a drink.
His wife owned a restaurant. So he decided to walk over there. And the vibe was quite different.
Two of their waitresses, they were just hysterical. They were so jittery that they were so happy. They had filled the car with all these gasoline tanks. They had food and canned goods, toilet paper. They'd taken out like $5,000 of cash. And their car was filled with all of this stuff. And I think I was a bit rude to them.
David Robert had been the anonymous figure behind the year 2000 bug hoax website. And he finally thought it was safe for him to emerge from the shadows. He was wrong.
I don't know why I got cocky and that was my biggest mistake. And so that's when I think the Globe and Mail reached out to me. And that's when I wrote the full-page commentary in the National Globe and Mail on January 6, 2000. And their terrible headline, which they chose, was called, 'You Got Conned and I Told You So.' Ouch! Ouch!
You can still find the piece online. In it, he made his argument that while Y2K was a real problem, it had been blown out of proportion. And it was actually about something much deeper. Quote: "In the end, the panic had nothing to do with the flip from 99 to 00. It was about our culture's fear and dependence on electric computers made out of plastic, glass, and metal." David Robert was still working for the federal government. And that week, after he published his piece in The Globe and Mail, he joined his weekly staff meeting by phone.
And then I realized there's a lot of people in the room, and then they introduce themselves and there are a lot of the higher-ups. And they pretty much said, we read your Globe and Mail article, and that wasn't a good thing to do. And they didn't fire me at the time. But as I was talking, I had five computer systems monitors and I lost my feed. So I was kind of being terminated in real time. So that kind of hit my gut thinking, oh, this is bad.
He technically wasn't fired because he'd been on rolling contracts for the last decade. But his time working for the federal government was over. Both David Robert and Peter had their lives irrevocably changed by Y2K.
Oh yeah, my entire world, my entire '90s was computers and it stopped dead. So after my contract was terminated, and then I went to work in my wife's restaurant. With no restaurant experience before, I was the worst waiter you could ever imagine, worst bartender, which is awful. I went from coding the mainframes of the government of Canada to saying, 'are you finished with your plate, sir?' So that was my drop. That was a really bad time. That was a very, very odd time.
In total, the global cost of Y2K readiness has been estimated to be $600 billion. An absolutely staggering figure. And even to this day, Peter and David Robert have completely opposing opinions on whether or not all that time and money was worth it. But David Robert points out that many countries who didn't spend nearly the money that Canada, the US, Australia or Britain did, emerged from Y2K relatively unscathed. Italy and Japan spent hardly anything. They just did the regular maintenance which needed to be done, which was perfect. And he still believes that the people like Peter who were sounding the alarm in the media were just stringing us all along. He says that no matter what happened on New Year's Day, they couldn't lose.
That was the best thing to do. You just get the people hyped up and fix it, and then accept their money because nothing was going to happen on the year 2000. Even at the time, I knew they were going to win because this is the perfect scam. It's a win-win for them.
David Robert has worn a lot of different hats in his life. In the 1980s, he worked as a writer, a researcher, an actor and even a part-time comedian. But by the late ‘80s, a lot of that work was starting to dry up.
I just met my new girlfriend and we just moved to Edmonton. I was looking for work at a file clerk job at the federal government, and I'd worked my way up and then I got interested in computers.
At that time, the World Wide Web didn't even exist. The nascent Internet was a new frontier full of possibilities. Well, there's a revolution going on in rec rooms, offices and classrooms around the world. They're sharing scientific data, arguing philosophy or passing on cooking tips and gossip, night and day through a computer network called Internet. David Robert was a part of it, spending much of his free time making websites just for the fun of it.
It was just so thrilling that the potential of the Internet in the early 90s was just such an exciting, thrilling time. Those websites were horrific in today's terms. It took you three hours to upload, but it was exciting.
And soon he was putting some of that newfound expertise to work for the federal government.
So I created this kind of this very basic website that would help people troubleshoot our equipment around the country. I had a conference in Ottawa, I showed it and they loved it. So they handpicked me right from a file clerk in Edmonton, right to national headquarters in the Government of Canada in Hull to do that. So it was this massive career jump from a file clerk, right to coding things for the mainframe of the Government of Canada was fantastic. So that was in 96 and 97 and I was thinking, this is my career, this is fantastic and reading everything about the internet, the potential of it, or even called the superhighway, the information superhighway was the goofy term in cyberspace. We're in cyberspace right now and that was such a big deal.
He was now part of teams that were helping to make the federal government more accessible to people, creating systems that allowed citizens to check on the status of their unemployment insurance or social security, the kind of stuff that makes life a little better for normal folks.
And then I would say the Y2K circus came into town, set up their tent, and everything stopped.
By then, David Robert was familiar with the Millennium Bug problem. And he says that there's no doubt that it was an issue that needed to be addressed. But it wasn't long before he saw it take over every part of his job and the jobs of everyone else around him.
Everything was Y2K. It was a major line item in every meeting. Everyone talked about it. It just took over everything. And the main thing, Y2K was real. The year 2000 bug was real. We had to check all codes and all different computer systems to see what would happen when it went to 99 to 00. Well, this was important, essential work. It can't be emphasized enough just how utterly monotonous it was. For the people on the ground. It was simple” and boring as heck. Looking for that code dates is the most dullest thing. Let's say I gave you a dictionary and sat you down at a desk with a pen and I asked you to circle every E in that dictionary. Go do that for the next six months and that's your job.
By 1998, Canadian businesses and governments were becoming increasingly panicked. A task force of senior corporate executives warned that some businesses risked going under because of Y2K glitches. Treasury Board Committee for the Federal Government had even more dire predictions. Social Security and EI checks might just stop going out. The CRA might not even be able to collect taxes. The immigration system might come to a complete halt. And fridges in government research labs holding dangerous bacteria might stop working. Leading to all kinds of potential apocalyptic scenarios. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien made it clear to his ministers that Y2K was now the priority. Everything else would have to be set aside. And that's what truly drove David Robert Loblaw up the wall. All of those important projects that he'd been working on that had been making the lives of Canadians just a little bit better, they were set aside.
We had tons of projects, everything pretty much ground to a halt, like any type of new research into any type of telephony or anything. And we had to just go through all of the old code. And I always say that, gotta say, the Y2K was a million-dollar problem that morphed into a multi-billion-dollar industry, just because of the hysteria, the fear of it.
And that's why he decided to launch the website. It was called the Year 2000 Computer Bug Hoax, a direct response to Peter's website. He ran it anonymously, because he was a federal civil servant and didn't want to run afoul of his bosses. But his purpose was to be a counterbalance to what he saw as hysteria in the media and in the government. Hysteria that he felt was caused by people like Peter. And while it was a simple site, it had the style and panache that websites from the 1990s are famous for.
Mine was at Angel Fire. And I think the front, very top had all these flames, huge flames. Then I had all my theories and a bunch of links. And it was really a bare bones kind of thing.
He was expecting maybe a few dozen people to find it. But he ended up with a much bigger audience than that.
I was expecting some friends and a couple of geeks to answer. Getting 100 emails in a day at that time was mind boggling. It was incredible. And I don't know if you remember seeing all the old websites when they had the hit counter at the bottom and then they had flowers and they were so ugly, ugly as hell. And so looking at that, I think, oh my God, you're watching in real time the hit counter. And my problem was I created the hit counter was only five digits and was getting to the 90,000s. I think I just created my own Y2K problem.
Luckily, it did in fact flip over and add an extra digit once he reached 100,000 views. Meanwhile, Peter continued to warn of impending disaster to anyone who would listen. He was writing 10 columns a month, traveled to more than 40 different countries, and he was doing media interviews with almost every free hour he had. He was also helping to build a community of IT professionals around the world to tackle the millennium bug. At one point, we had 90,000 people on a discussion group. David Robert Loblaw was also getting hate for trying to throw cold water on that very same hysteria.
And that was my most exciting part because there's people that were cursing me to hell. I got a curse on me and my family forever, which is interesting because he cursed me and then nothing happened. So, I emailed him back. I said, I'm still waiting. What do I do? There's a curse. What happened? So, I did it a couple of times and he ghosted me. But yeah, there's a lot of those emails and all the, but really sad ones too, saying, 'I'm a retired person. If the power goes out and there's no food.' There are sadder, unbelievably sad ones that I got too, which is really awful. Then there's really angry, insane ones that were just scary as all hell.
As the months went by, in December 31st, 1999, drew ever nearer. Tens of thousands of Canadians were going through millions and millions of lines of code. The federal government alone had 11,000 people working on Y2K compliance. The National Energy Board tried to ensure that their pipeline safety systems didn't shut down and cause fuel shortages. Banks gathered up enormous amounts of cash to forestall bank runs. And the Canadian military drew up contingency plans in case government services came to a halt. Thirteen thousand troops would be deployed across the country and all of them would be given enough provisions to be self-sufficient for 30 days. They called it, appropriately, Operation Abacus. When the day finally arrived, some people waited with bated breath, but not David Robert Loblaw.
So I was at home, my home office, knowing nothing was going to happen, you know, surrounded by computers, all my feeds to Ottawa, five or six different computers.
He'd already spoken to someone in Australia, which had just experienced the year change without any major problems. So he sat looking at the bare bones news websites of the time. And so at midnight, nothing happens.
Oh, I open a beer, have a drink.
His wife owned a restaurant. So he decided to walk over there. And the vibe was quite different.
Two of their waitresses, they were just hysterical. They were so jittery that they were so happy. They had filled the car with all these gasoline tanks. They had food and canned goods, toilet paper. They'd taken out like $5,000 of cash. And their car was filled with all of this stuff. And I think I was a bit rude to them.
David Robert had been the anonymous figure behind the year 2000 bug hoax website. And he finally thought it was safe for him to emerge from the shadows. He was wrong.
I don't know why I got cocky and that was my biggest mistake. And so that's when I think the Globe and Mail reached out to me. And that's when I wrote the full-page commentary in the National Globe and Mail on January 6, 2000. And their terrible headline, which they chose, was called, 'You Got Conned and I Told You So.' Ouch! Ouch!
You can still find the piece online. In it, he made his argument that while Y2K was a real problem, it had been blown out of proportion. And it was actually about something much deeper. Quote: "In the end, the panic had nothing to do with the flip from 99 to 00. It was about our culture's fear and dependence on electric computers made out of plastic, glass, and metal." David Robert was still working for the federal government. And that week, after he published his piece in The Globe and Mail, he joined his weekly staff meeting by phone.
And then I realized there's a lot of people in the room, and then they introduce themselves and there are a lot of the higher-ups. And they pretty much said, we read your Globe and Mail article, and that wasn't a good thing to do. And they didn't fire me at the time. But as I was talking, I had five computer systems monitors and I lost my feed. So I was kind of being terminated in real time. So that kind of hit my gut thinking, oh, this is bad.
He technically wasn't fired because he'd been on rolling contracts for the last decade. But his time working for the federal government was over. Both David Robert and Peter had their lives irrevocably changed by Y2K.
Oh yeah, my entire world, my entire '90s was computers and it stopped dead. So after my contract was terminated, and then I went to work in my wife's restaurant. With no restaurant experience before, I was the worst waiter you could ever imagine, worst bartender, which is awful. I went from coding the mainframes of the government of Canada to saying, 'are you finished with your plate, sir?' So that was my drop. That was a really bad time. That was a very, very odd time.
In total, the global cost of Y2K readiness has been estimated to be $600 billion. An absolutely staggering figure. And even to this day, Peter and David Robert have completely opposing opinions on whether or not all that time and money was worth it. But David Robert points out that many countries who didn't spend nearly the money that Canada, the US, Australia or Britain did, emerged from Y2K relatively unscathed. Italy and Japan spent hardly anything. They just did the regular maintenance which needed to be done, which was perfect. And he still believes that the people like Peter who were sounding the alarm in the media were just stringing us all along. He says that no matter what happened on New Year's Day, they couldn't lose.
That was the best thing to do. You just get the people hyped up and fix it, and then accept their money because nothing was going to happen on the year 2000. Even at the time, I knew they were going to win because this is the perfect scam. It's a win-win for them.