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An Open Letter to the Y2K Bug
Felis writes "Did you work on New Year's Eve? I did. So did the person that wrote this letter.
It's for those of us that worked while the rest of the world was celebrating something we'll never see again in our lifetimes. Unfortunately, there's no mention of police checkpoints or the plainclothes fuzz that harrassed my coworkers and me. Bitter? Me?"
I am sure this is just flame bait, but I will responded anyway.
If you would take a look at the history of the Y2K problem, you would understand much more. In the 50's and early 60's the cost of storage was very high compared to today's mulit-gigabyte drives. Companies made decision (as today) and went for the cheapest cost when building systems. This was often decided by groups of people including managers at the time, it has always been very expensive to build enterprise wide computing. After these systems were in place and creating large databases, they became difficult to update and change. The people makeing the decisions could not have forseen software and data layouts surviving for 30 or 40 years. I suspect you can point to nothing in your life that you have predicted 30 years in advance. Learn a little, before you open your mouth.
I don't care to speculate at how many tech people were stuck behind desks while possibly their PHBs were in different rooms getting drunk and dancing on tables when the ball dropped.
:)
I know that at my company, ALL of the UNIX admins and database people were required to be present from at least 11:00PM till whenever they thought it was OK for them to leave (which happened to be in the wee hours of the morning)
You can't really blame the guy for holding a grudge and of course everybody that knows something about the computer was right along with "Joe Computer" in despising the media sensationalism that brought the pseudo-terror to the masses and the very real profits to those of the media that were doing the fear-mongering.
I don't think that this "Open Letter" was the best worded or the best written thing that I've ever seen, but I think it does a decent job of summing up why the whole Y2K thing sucks from the administrator point of view. A decent read, anyway. I'm sure that some of the people at my job would get a chuckle out of it, so I'll pass it along.
With some of the acid in the letter though, I don't understand why the writer bothered to keep up the facade of sarcasm with all of the "Thank You"'s.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
I may not like the amount of compensation that I received for working New Year and I have grumbled a bit, but overall, I won't complain too much.
Why?
Because there will always be a trade off of good things and bad things for a job. How often do you hear people in your workplace gloat at how good the job market is, how easy it is too change jobs, how much money they get paid etc etc? IT people are living in a golden era at the moment where we are in demand. Go out to the real world and see how the rest of the population lives!
In Australia (where I live), only 20% of the population earns above $50k - be thankful that you have a job (probably one that puts you in well into that top 20% group), and not only just a job, but one which has opportunity, most likely pays reasonably well and one which has a future.
Focus on that, and not on the small inconveniences like working one night a year which will be forgotten soon anyway.
Does this guy really think that 2000 new years is the most important moment in his life? What a looser! Watching the millenium roll by made me realise that it's really completely meaningless. The important moments are the ones you make, those personal events in your life that come together to build the person that you are.
It's 2am, January 1st, 2000. Most of the parties are over, all the large crowds have dispersed.
Shoot, where I was on NYE2000, the party was just gettin' started at 2:00 and wasn't over till the sun came up. How many of you saw the first (post) sunrise of the second millennium? (and I know you nit-pickers were working, so go ahead a tell me how many years it will be before the big number in our year system changes again)
Sorry, but I have no sympathy for whiners. If Y2K was that big a deal, you should have made sure you got it off, if you couldn't and it still irked you, quit. It's not like there's a shortage of IT workers or anything. I spend two months planning my trip(!) and it was all worth it. This article is like all the whining here about shitty posts, like bitchin' makes it better.
Happy Year 2000 to everyone, and if you didn't get to celebrate it (and are bitter), learn that a job is a job, but your life is your own.
+&x
No offence, but we didn't wait until 1999 to fix the 2000 date problem.
Back when I was in college in 1993, they were teaching us COBOL, and what did we do with COBOL you ask? Simple.. we wrote programs that looked at databases and other programs and appeneded four digit years instead of two digit years.
(Sarcasm alert) Gee.. I wonder how that became useful ;) (end sarcasm)
Banks had to worry about it in 1996 when they started making bank cards with '00' expiration dates. Some with those new cards were unable to get their money.
The media didn't hype it until this year, meanwhile, those that were actually hard at work fixing it were sick of dealing with it by the time the media made a big deal out of it.
That's why nothing happened, we've been working on it for years, no-one noticed until the media got their suits in a wad.
---The proceeding comments were not paid for by the following advertisers.
... not to mention, it's nice to see the media focusing on something useful for a change, instead of Monica Lewinsky etc.
What was it an old medical text my friend was looking through said? "A wise physician always states the case is grave, that he may be praised for his good work if he brings his patient back to health, yet is known to have seen the truth of the illness should the patient die."
It was important to be prepared for problems. And this is one case in which information, and information overkill, was probably MUCH BETTER than lack of official information, and people left to fill in the gaps based on rumor.
I don't know if the rest of the country had it as together as Rochester seemed to, but there was always a remarkable lack of panic here (aside from a few bored paranoid suburbanite slackers who wanted the apocalypse to happen so they could lead an army into battle for real). My biggest fear was of the Y2K bug in people's brains, and given the way my neighborhood generally responds to things like snow emergencies, I realized that despite some Cassandra types saying "don't be in a big city!" I was safest right here, three miles from downtown Rochester.
And I was right. The worst thing that happened was that my friend Devon decided to be a smartass and trip the circuit breaker at midnight. We could see lights on from across the street, so nobody got worried, but he seems to be having trouble re-setting his VCR.
I made half-joking, half-serious "stockpiles" of various sorts, but now I have enough toiletries and pasta for several months. Nothing wrong with that; I bought on sale. Everything went well.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
Yeah but it *was* your choice to go into the army.. a lot of folk didn't get the choice about working Y2K night. Not many people when they joined their it admin job thought they'd be working on new years eve before a new millennium.
Yes, but most everyone in this forum chose to be in the job that they are in now, just like razvedchik.
If Management wants you to work on NYE and this is unacceptable to you, quit. If you are too afraid to quit, organize with your coworkers and raise hell. If you are too afraid to organize, well... maybe that's why Management asked you to work on NYE in the first place.
In many regions the job market is at it's healthist point in decades, especially in the computer industry. Use this to your advantage.
You are your own boss.
-= Stefan
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
I worked on the Y2K programmes (at corporate level) for a few large companies here in Australia over the past two years. I left all my contracts at the end of June 1999 because I saw the writing on the wall. Everything looked like it had been sorted and if there were problems, we'd probably be able to deal with them.
:) So, I left the lucrative contracts to do something else (my own pet project)
:)
:)
I didn't stockpile, I didn't run & hide. I sure as shit didn't want to work over NYE (irrespective of the year change, a party is a party
My friends who remained on the projects had the joy of working through NYE and being (mostly) bored shitless. I was with my wife & child and enjoyed myself with various mind altering substances (mostly booze - I'm getting old
Those who worked NYE and didn't get well compensated may well want to be reviewing their resumes
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
I am an Orthodox Christian. Christmas is 13 days later for me than for everyone else. Easter is usually on a different day, and no allowances are made for Holy Week observances regardless of when it falls. And there are 11 other major feast days throughout the year that the Protestant denominations - and therefore work holiday schedules - take no note of whatsoever. I get none of these days off gratis. During Lent and Advent, which are seasons when I am required to abstain from meat, dairy products, fish, alcohol and vegetable oil, the company cafeteria continues to offer the same old deep fried, greasy, cholesterol-laden fare.
I could bitch a blue streak about it. Or I could just do as I do: bring my own lunch when necessary, and use comp time, flex time and vacation days to fulfill my religious obligations. If you really resent the days off you are obligated to take, why don't you offer to cover for those days (if staffing is required) in exchange for days off when you could use them?
Incidently, the original post ought to have been moderated down "offtopic." There is nothing particularly Christian about when the New Year begins. It's a result of the calendar reforms of Julius Caesar. In the intervening centuries, a number of other dates were used for the beginning of the year, and these generally were chosen for religious reasons, but January 1 is a purely secular holiday.
If you're going to go on a self-righteous tirade, it helps to have actual facts in hand.
And the brethren went away edified.
You may have missed the parties, been away from your families, etc... But I will always remember that there were some people who sacrificed their time, and alot of potential enjoyment, making sure that the rest of us got through the most critical hour of the millenium. Without all of you, Y2K very well could have had the effect of the movie. Without the huge amounts of overtime you put in and sacrifices you made none of the rest of us could have enjoyed the holiday. You may feel unappreciated, but your work on ensuring a smooth rollover was vital. Without you, I would have had no light, no heat, no water, etc... for several days. Thank you for your sacrifices.
They are intrinsically evil
I guess this is the part where I get lost. I find it hard to believe that any person is INHERENTLY evil (not hitler, or stalin, or even the guys who wake me up doing construction across the street at 7am). Especially a whole group of people with no real biological relationship. What is the cause of the evil? And how do they get through breakfast every day?
I mean, seriously -- how could an inherently evil human being survive? you'd kill your parents as soon as possible, never make any friends, and probably be strangled in your crib for being such a brat.
Certainly people do evil things (although they usually think they're doing good things -- they just turn out to be evil after the fact). The closest thing to an inherently evil person would probably be an amoral person -- one who literally doesn't understand or subscribe to morality, meaning that they just do whatever they want. But even that isn't EVIL, because some of the things they want to do will be good and some will be bad.
So these jewish kids who go to your school, do they kill people on a regular basis or eat babies or something? I would suspect that they probably get nervous giving presentations in front of the class. Probably some of them are popular, some of them aren't. One or two of the girls might even be cute, though the rest are nothing special. Some of them are smarter than the others, some of them are funnier.
I'd suspect they're not all that different from your regular group of white suburban kids, other than the occassional Jewish thing they do together (but Young Life doesn't exactly keep a low profile on most campuses either, so you can hardly single them out for showing religion on occassion).
I think everyone should live in New York City at least once in their life. Seeing so many people working so hard to get by in a city with a hundred languages is pretty interesting. Everyone gets the same embarassed look on their face when they trip on the sidewalk, regardless of where they come from.
It just strikes me as odd that we have to come up with such arbitrary distinctions in order to make an "us" and "them" -- Good lord, we're talking about people who essentially believe in Christianity 1.0. Just because they never upgraded doesn't make 'em evil, it makes them contented users (although God sure did get a lot friendlier in version 2.0, at least in the documentation). And then all the Christians sat around and missed the upgrade to 3.0 courtesy of Mohommad -- what's up with that? Granted, I don't see a lot of compelling new features in the upgrade. 30 days of not eating while the sun is up? We paid for this? give me a resurrection any day, but i can hardly work up the energy to hate a guy just because he refuses to eat pork!...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
People are quick to accuse the media of trumping this up more than needed because nothing happened.
This is false logic.
The reason nothing happened is a direct result of the media blasting this home, so that businesses and governments would start moving their asses to get this looked after. If the media DIDN'T cover it we'd all probably be without a lot of infrastructure right now.
People see nothing happening as a sign that Y2K was a waste of time, breath, and money. They think that because nothing happened that all the preparations were for nothing. They just don't seem to understand that the preparations worked, we survived. A threat to our civilization was brought to the forefront and we mobilized to stop it, we fought off the invisible invasion of time.
Yet people are angry, because nothing happened.
This is a testament to what the human race can do when motivated. You shouldn't be angry, you should be PROUD nothing happened.
All this while some other people are angry that they were stuck at work during the celebrations of the turn of the millennium.
To this I say "You're in luck, thats not until next year."
-- iCEBaLM
I am sure that most of you know - whether you believe it or not - the story of Jonah from the Hebrew bible.
... how to say, "man page" for human problems. Think about it.
In the story, god comes down and tells Jonah that humans have to fix their ways or they will be destroyed. When humans fixed their ways, nothing happened to them and Jonah was peeved at god for making him go to the trouble of fixing their ways if nothing was to happen.
The point I'm making is we spent billions upon billions of dollars fixing this bug. The bug is squashed. Y2k comes along, and the bug is already dead and as such doesn't bite. Everyone cries because they didn't get hit by the bug to know it was real.
Disclaimer: I don't "believe" in god or subscribe to organised religion other then culturally, but the religious texts are there for just this kind of occasion. The events that have been built around them are just to make people remember that there is this set of texts as a
OFTC: By the community, for the community
I've been in the US Army for 8 years.
I've missed anniversaries, birthdays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and anything in-between so that I could go stop two races of small, rakija-drinking people from killing each other.
Take the time when you can get it. When you have days off, have DAYS OFF. A fact of life is that sometimes you have to work on fun days. If that is below your station, quit, get a job shoveling trash.
At least your computer didn't blow up or try to shoot you. That's not more than I can say about some of my holidays.
I do what the voices on my console tell me to do.
10) Embedded chips really don't care what year it is
9) There aren't 200,000 virus writers on the face of the earth.
8) Microsoft has code that reads: "99 + 1 = 2000 for purposes of getDate"
7) Some of my web pages are now Y2.1K noncompliant
6) Seattle is not a party town.
5) New Years is not an event.
4) Microsoft still has more bugs and viruses than all of y2k put together.
3) Pulling your server because the date changes makes you look like a fool.
2) 2600.com really does have a sense of humor.
1) Don't release the doves and launch the fireworks at the same time!
No Zen is good zen