Tyrades! by Danny Tyree

My wife recalls the night of December 31, 1999 as a time of anxiety and trepidation.

(Of course she views every night as a time of anxiety and trepidation. Okay, I’ll trim my toenails! Are you satisfied???)

*Ahem*

We were at her parents’ home for our customary New Year’s Eve celebration and feared that the ball drop on “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” would coincide with the plunging of Times Square into total darkness (and my father-in-law having to use a flashlight instead of the porch light for his obligatory firing-of-the-shotgun-into-the-air ritual).

That’s because the whole world was on edge about the potential apocalypse tied to the highly publicized “Y2K bug.”

You may recall that the looming crisis came about because – in the early days of mainframe computers – computer memory was so prohibitively expensive that programmers opted to take shortcuts and kick the can down the road. They (well, their employers) chose to identify 4-digit years with 2-digit numbers because with their 20th-century prejudice, it would “always” be 19-something-or-another.

(Seriously. You can buy a 64-gigabyte micro-SD card for a pittance now, but memory used to require collateral and a co-signer. President Reagan brought the Soviet Union to economic collapse with a military buildup, but the Gipper could just as easily have accomplished it by tricking the Evil Empire into producing a single video of a water-skiiing squirrel.)

As the year 2000 approached, leaders in government and industry began pondering what all could go wrong with telecommunications, bond maturity dates, age restrictions, prison sentences and other vital considerations if computers suddenly decided that it was January 1, 1900 instead of January 1, 2000.

Understandably, some of the biggest fears involved public utilities. (“Your water ceased flowing at midnight? Have no fear. We’ll dispatch a barbershop quartet in a horseless carriage right away.”)

As it turned out, computer-related problems were relatively minor in the opening days of 2000, and that has been a bone of contention for me. Over the years, I have often bristled when some loudmouth skeptic scoffed about the (admittedly expensive) preemptive measures taken to soften the blow of Y2K.

I wasn’t a programmer, but I worked in data processing until 1998 and was on the periphery of the tireless effort put into anticipating and patching the myriad things that could experience chaos with purchasing, receiving, manufacturing and payroll.

The attitude of the skeptics is like some Monday morning quarterback pontificating, “I don’t know why we had to build all those planes and draft all those boys. Hitler wound up hiding in a bunker and committing suicide, anyway.”

Granted, hype was plentiful. Shelters, generators and canned goods sold like crazy. The news media went into overdrive on breathless reporting. (“You’d be breathless, too, if you realized that plants might stop performing photosynthesis on January 1!”) Authors cranked out opportunistic page-turners. (“101 Places You Must Visit Before Your Nerf Gun Stops Working,” anyone?)

Some evangelists promised the Rapture. Or at least a nation coming closer to finding the right priorities, a nation coming closer to God, a nation coming closer to helping them buy a second condo in Boca Raton…

My family will mark the anniversary quietly; but if you wish, you may Party Like It’s 1999.

No, not 1899! There’s no cocaine in the Coke and Uber is fresh out of bicycles built for two!

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Copyright 2024 Danny Tyree, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Danny Tyree welcomes email responses at [email protected] and visits to his Facebook fan page “Tyree’s Tyrades.”