DU'ers, where were you on New Year's Eve of '99?

[Shrubhater]

I bet a lot of people were freaked about Y2K, they might of thought that a doomsday was coming. I don't know for sure though.(were any of you freaked about Y2K?

[HEyHEY]

1. At a wedding

[hippiepunk]

2. At a party.

booze and bottle rockets DON'T mix. ;-)

[xmas74]

3. Pregnant, in the hospital w/ the flu

suffering from dehydration and exhaustion. They wouldn't let me have a sick day at work. I went in and fainted. The nurse personally took me to the ER.

[halobeam]

5. ooo sounds like you don't do anything easy...

just like me.

My oldest was born on New Years Day.

[xmas74]

23. I worked two jobs at the time and had just

left an abusive relationship. I was worried about money issues and I had a job that would not let me have the day off d/t coverage issues (that night was the habilitation center. I had just gotten into dispatching on a part-time basis). I just wanted to sleep-and I got alot of sleep w/ the three day stay at the hospital! Plus, the nurses were wonderful. They knew that I was used to working all night and when they weren't busy they would come down to my room, turn on some music and we would play rummy and poker.
It was the best vacation ever until I got the bill.

[halobeam]

28. now we are even more alike than I first thought

I left a horrible relationship while pregnant too. It also landed me in the hosp. I was putting in many hours overtime for the money. Wound up exhausted and dehydrated. Wow. Don't miss those times, but isn't it a mind f*** when you know you'd do it all over again if that were the only way to have your child in your life?

ps. I hope times are better for you now too.

[xmas74]

49. A little better.

I'm not being hospitalized for exhaustion at least.
And I would definitely do it all over again. My little one will be five on the 17th. It was worth everything that I went through and then some.

[ET Awful]

4. In my living room drinking beers.

:)

[LiberalVoice]

6. Asleep in my bedroom in Philadelphia.

I missed the actual turning of the millenia.

[Shrubhater]

13. I feel your pain,

Pretty much all I remember was that I was in a hotel.(In case you're wondering, I was 8 back then.)

[Kadie]

7. I don't remember.

:D

[trof]

8. Hunkered down. Nobody got it, hunh?

THE GREAT MILLENIUM DISASTER!

[BlackVelvetElvis]

9. God, I wasted that night.

I spent it (3+ hours) talking to someone I dated for 3 months.
I should've been at a club...or painting my bedroom.

[MrScorpio]

10. We just back to the States

We were hanging out on the floor of our new townhouse

[Kikosexy2]

11. People...

in L.A. did...sorry ass parties...but it rained also--put a damper on things too.

[ghostsofgiants]

12. At home

I was 14 and had to babysit my little brothers I think. Spent the night playing video games.

[Skink]

17. On a ship in the middle of the Carribbean...

Don't remember to much but I had to go see the Staff captain the next day.:headbang:

[Rowdyboy]

14. At my house, with my partner and our two best friends....

Good friends, food and champagne.

[SmileyBoy]

15. Sitting at home, getting ready to pop the wine bottle with my folks.

I was only 17, but my parents allowed me to have some wine.:D

[madinmaryland]

16. Stayed up with my son and his best friend.

Someone had to. My wife fell asleep about 12:15, so I stayed up til about 2. they made it apparently til about 5. wounded the next day. 10 year olds!

[Left Is Write]

18. Sitting on my couch, nursing my 3-day-old baby.

Watching the 24-hour New Year's coverage on ABC and taping GSN's Y2Play special on the other TV.

[bigwillq]

19. I was at my buddy's dorm in Providence, R.I.

I saw the bal drop then I drank a bottle of bubbly, later puked my brains out and then passed out! FUN STUFF!:hi:

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

20. at an inipi ceremony

which is a Lakota sweatlodge ceremony. I was able to watch Sam Waterston at the White House introduce somebody or other, but all I remember was Sam's smile. He has a lovely lovely lovely smile. (Yep, I'm a big fan)

[alittlelark]

21. I threw a party..16 or so people...candles everywhere,

bottles of water stacked up in misc. locations.... It was a 'OH MY GOD - IT'S Y2K' party. It was quite fun, and oh, the lights never flickered.

[mcscajun]

22. Doing the overnight shift at a major bank in NYC...

Where a hundred or so of us were monitoring all the systems to make Sure nothing happened.

There were similar overnight shifts all over the world.

We had food, beverages (no alcohol), TV hookup, games, cots for sleeping, all the 'comforts' of home except good music and the people we really wanted to spend New Year's Eve with.

Nobody in the banks was freaked out, 'cause we'd spent the previous 2.5 years working to correct all the things that might have caused a problem. But as you just Never Know where computer code is concerned, we had techies, ops people. VPs and Senior VPs pulling the overnight.

Some fun, huh?

Oh yeah, we got special souvenirs and 'goodie bags' as our special reward and some small cash rewards later.

The "2000" company logo gym bag came in handy when my department's work got offshored in 2003 and I took a semi-voluntary 'early retirement' and I took up swimming lessons. :)

[Shrubhater]

32. What possible problems did you correct?

[mcscajun]

39. Every piece of program code that was reliant on the infamous two-digit

field to hold the year; the two-digit field was used to save on memory space. Memory doesn't cost a whole helluva lot now, but it sure did back when most of these programs were written:

Cost of 1MB of RAM
1970 -- $3,200,000
1980 -- $64,000
1990 -- $120
1995 -- $30
1997 -- $5
1998 -- $1

Banks and other large corporations were notoriously slow in replacing or revising any program that was working just because advances in computer power or memory cost made the older design decisions moot. So come the 90s, there were still an awful lot of original, heavily patched and "updated" programs that had core functions that had never been revised.

There were also two-digit years chosen to represent default positions which in the new century could cause problems.

All of this had to be identified and changed. A great many of the programs were written in computer languages no longer used, so many COBOL programmers and such had to be brought back from their recent retirements. They made some nice money doing that, too.

Mostly what we did on that New Year's Eve was monitor date rollover and run test transactions on every system to ensure proper results, while calling out to the various remote test locations to ensure nothing was being missed.

We never bought into the panic and media hype, but in fact it was the combined efforts of techies around the globe that made Y2k a Non-Event. :)

As usual, it's a thankless job when everything runs properly.

[ronnykmarshall]

42. I work for bank too.

We had a "war room" set up and that was even on the national news.

[dsewell]

24. Standing under Thomas Jefferson's statue

Honest truth. Outside the Rotunda at the University of Virginia. It just felt like a good symbolic way to usher in the next millennium.

[Fleshdancer]

25. At a Shinto shrine in Japan

It was my first New Year's in Japan. I was 6 months pregnant so I couldn't drink, but experiencing the celebrations in a culturally different way was amazing. My husband, friends, and I had a blast.

[Skittles]

26. at work at a huge IT company

awaiting the fallout which turned out to be quite minimal

[Nikia]

27. We went Glow bowling

I was home for college. My sister was there too and my now husband had traveled there too to visit me. My dad lives in a little village. Besides the bar, which my sister was too young for anyway, there wasn't much open New Year's Eve there. My husband didn't want to go to a Church group celebrations. We didn't want to drive to the bigger town 13 miles away where they were having a community celebration out of fear of drunk drivers.
The bowling alley was open. They played music and had weird light effects. It was an alright way to spend the evening.
Personally, I wasn't worried about Y2K after I woke up on Dec 31 morning and heard that Russia got through it alright. At that point, I knew that there was nothing to worry about.

[SarahB]

29. At home with my ex-husband.

We ummm... smoked something (for me, it's pretty rare, but I will admit to sometimes) and then we watched this Dexter's Laboratory movie on Cartoon Network and had sex. :shrug:

[RFKHumphreyObama]

30. I was attending a family gathering overseas

It was a wonderful evening New Year’s Eve Party. My cousin and her husband hosted the NYE Party at her house and we had relatives join us from various parts of the world where they lived –indeed my family and I had travelled down from Australia to be there. My uncles and aunties were all in attendance and my then 93-year old grandmother was also present (if my memory serves me accurately). As well as that my cousin had gathered around some of her own friends and her brother persuaded me to give a speech about the past millennium. We counted down to the New Year and just when the new Millennium struck, we all gathered around and sung the traditional New Year’s hymn. Then we went to an uncle’s house for another party.

2000 also marked a new chapter in my life. In 1999 I’d finished high school and 2000 was my first year of university.

I’ll never forget that evening and all the optimism, hope and confidence we had for the future back then and the climate of peace and prosperity that we enjoyed thanks to having such a wonderful and visionary President in the White House. I miss those days immensely

[BlueIris]

31. I was totally freaked out, in Pioneer Courthouse Sqaure,

in Portland, OR. Police did a crappy job of crowd control, and I was totally crushed in a huuuuuge mass of partyers among a ton of my not-so-nice ex-friends and their jerky Portland associates (not ripping Portlanders, I love you guys, but my ex-friends worked for and knew some major meanies). Actually, the party afterward was nice. It's weird, looking back--that was, I had predicted at the time, the last time that crowd of friends and I were together. It was definitely the last time anybody there was still anyone else's friend. The election changed a lot for all of us--what happened among that group of friends and I is sort of what I see happening all around this country, as the social divisions created by Bush's selection in 2000 have split of families, partnerships, other relationships and in some ways, the soul of the nation.

[Aristus]

33. Enjoying a quiet evening at home with my wife.

Neither of us believed the Y2K hype. We relaxed, cracked a bottle of extra dry Champagne, and watched some TV. If we'd only known that 2000a.d. was the beginning of the end...

[peekaloo]

34. Sick as a dog in bed.

That was the Christmas of the nasty flu bug, which I contracted in Florida while on vacation, which aggravated my bronchitis, which in turn led me to missing the first two weeks of work in 2000.

We had a Y2K committee at work and had busted our arses making sure all of our computers were in compliance so I wasn't too worried. Since I felt like I was going to croak I was kinda looking forward to Doomsday. ;-)

[Name removed]

35. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[CanuckAmok]

36. In a multimillion dollar bunker 60' under GM Place in Vancouver.

Surrounded by a five year supply of canned chipped beef, frozen concentrated orange juice, a self-sustaining vegetable garden illuminated by full-spectrum florescent lighing, 500Gigs of digital pornography, a vodka still, and a cache of weapons which would make Ted Nugent vomit with envy.

Boy, was I ever disappointed.

[Zuni]

59. sounds like everyday to me

[Occulus]

37. Home. Alone.

It... wasn't the best New Year's I've ever had. 'Course, that was a pretty lonely period in my life.....

[qnr]

38. Not a bit about Y2K, but I was really worried about all of the people

thinking that the new millenium would be starting the next day, instead of in 2001. I was doing this at home, btw.

[In_The_Wind]

40. at home

enjoying a quiet New Year's Eve as I always do

[ronnykmarshall]

41. Flying home to SF from LA

Spent the evening with my best friend Anita and some other friends. I avoided the New Years eve maddness.

Had a date the next day that I later cancelled. This guy was a STALKER!! I was on the road working in LA and really wanted to spend time at home with my cat and my friends.

Stalker boy "broke up" with me. (it was a long, yet amusing story)

It was a GREAT way to ring in 2000!!

[bertha katzenengel]

43. In my apartment in Long Beach, longing for Mrs. V.

Not freaked at all.

[shawn703]

44. At Georgetown Hospital, in case the computers crashed

Nothing happened, but all of us computer geeks had to be onsite in case the life support machines started shutting off or something.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

45. I was at home and since I had to go to work Jan. 1, 2000, I went to bed

early and resentfully! Work was uneventful and quiet the next morning; LA hadn't been impacted at all by Y2K...

[sundog]

46. sick with the flu

really sick

it sucked

[u4ic]

47. I worked for a couple of hours that night

for an entertainment company, as a dealer for a funny-money casino, then me and my now-ex hunkered in a hotel room that night. And fought. :eyes:

[Orsino]

48. In bed, waiting for the lights to go out.

It was a Friday night, and I was not on duty (ISP I still work for). My wife and I had just gotten over the Martian Death Flu that hit us hard Christmas Eve.

[derby378]

50. Tipperary Inn - Dallas, TX

Watching the Irish Rogues perform at the pub that used to be our second home. And we all watched as the news anchor from KXAS tried an ATM machine shortly after the twelfth bell rang. It worked without a hitch.

[yellowdogintexas]

51. went to three parties and was back in my own home for

midnight

[cmf]

52. My roommate and I threw the hugest party

We weren't really worried about Y2K (my roommate at the time was a consultant who had spent the last few years working on the conversion). So, we threw a huge bash and partied like it was 1999. ;-)

[deutsey]

53. Working at a public library

Interestingly, some teen checked out one of those Left Behind books that night and issued an ominous warning that the end of the world was nigh. As an employee of the library, I bit my tongue and thought what a doofus he was.

Came home that night and watched the hoopla on TV. Was really impressed by the celebrations in Europe when midnight came; I thought the celebration in DC was lame, big time.

Of course, no catastrophe occurred...that wouldn't happen until November of 2000. I'm sure that dingleberry who checked out the Left Behind book was among those who voted for Bush and had, by then, completely erased his stupid mind of the belief that Y2K was going to bring about the Apocalypse.

[UrbScotty]

54. Watched "Air Bud" and saw Dick.

Clark, that is.

[sakabatou]

55. Watching The Matrix

[Lannes]

56. I was in school

Learning to be a recording engineer.Hung out with some of the other students that didnt go home for the holidays and partied.

[DS1]

57. How the hell would I know?

:shrug:

[Mojambo]

58. The Frontier Room

A great dive bar (that no longer exists) in Seattle.

A drank there in my 20's, A lot.

[Blue_In_AK]

60. No, I wasn't freaked out...just sitting at home with my x-husband.

[GirlinContempt]

61. At an Ethiopian restaurant, and the power went out

We just laughed.