Originally posted by "jgoewert" ...

While everyone else was partying like it was 1999, I spent the night in my company's war room braced for any Y2K issues. Being naive, right out of college I took a job at a major railroad company doing green screen work. The mainframe was ready. The minutes ticked by. At 12:00:00, everything sat pretty with no major problems. A collective sigh eminated.

12 minutes later, the red phone rang. A nightly script had crapped itself with the error "Date out of Range". Programmers scambled and midnight phone calls were made. Systems were analyzed to see if anything else had died and just didn't report.

7 minutes later, it turned out that there was this one field in the code for the script that failed that needed to be updated yearly to say what year it was. (WTF? Anyone heard of getDate() or the COBOL equivalient)?) It was permanently fixed and calm settled again.

3 minutes later, the red phone rings again. This time, it was much worse. The entire Dallas, TX yard had lost power. Obviously, this wasn't a coding problem on our end, but our war room was the only phone number for support that was written down. Still, we started backtracking and tried to grab the sessions that the Dallas yard was running so that nothing was lost. Everything in that yard halted. Managers nervously watched the news to see if Dallas as a whole had lost power or if some nuclear facility was about to blow.

Nothing was reported.... we worked and waited....

Two hours later, we got the news. Some trigger happy Texan decieded to celebrate in the new year by firing off his 6 shooter and accidentally blew a hole in the power transformer that linked to the train yard. Yee-hawtf?.

Other than that, Y2K was uneventful. I wouldn't report it as a "dud" that the media called it because many qualified programmers, engineers, and other profesionals had worked tirelessly to prepare systems for Y2K and the "dud" was a testament to the quality of their work.

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