IT team forced to camp in the office for days after Y2K bug found in boss's side project

The lack of trust that leads to outsourcing can be expensive

On Call Y2K December 26th is a holiday across much of the Reg-reading world, but it's also a Friday – the day on which we present a fresh instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column that recounts your tales of tech support encounters and exasperation.

This holiday season we're dipping into tales of tech support in the time of Y2K, starting with this tale from a reader we'll Regomize as "Cane" and who told us that in December 1999 he worked in the IT department at the UK branch of a "multinational booze purveyor."

Cane said he and his team felt confident.

"We spent much of the last two years testing and verifying everything, upgrading and replacing as needed," he told On Call.

Senior management came to appreciate the importance of the task and to make sure all staff understood the seriousness of the Y2K remediation effort, commissioned a custom screensaver that displayed a countdown to the fateful moment.

The alcohol making organization prevented the IT team from taking leave for two weeks after December 31st and warned they may need to be on-site full time for the duration in case things went wrong.

"They also hired consultants at ruinous cost to sit there and wear suits," Cane told On Call. "As the hour ticked closer, we were ordered by the Top Floor People to physically disconnect the network cable from the internet, to prevent little viruses from crawling down the wires and getting us."

All present watched the clock tick down from 1999 to 2000, then breathed a sigh of relief when nothing happened.

"After an hour we were allowed to reconnect to the outside world and confirm that the world had not ended," Cane told On Call.

And then a problem became apparent.

"Any PC that had been left switched on – against instructions – mysteriously crashed," Cane wrote.

Y2K redux

In case your career started after the year 2000 or you've forgotten the Y2K mess, let's refresh your memory … by explaining that in the early years of computing, memory was so scarce and expensive that programmers used only two digits to record years.

That became an issue as the year 2000 approached, because as the clock ticked over into the new year some programs would assume it was the year 1900 and malfunction … perhaps catastrophically.

All around the world, organizations spent billions testing and remediating their code. And on New Year's Eve 1999, many IT pros worked instead of partying, to make sure skilled help was at hand in case things went bad.

The IT team swung into action and rebooted the nearest machine, which came back to life and displayed a screensaver that was now counting backwards into negative numbers.

Cane later learned that the developer of the Y2K screensaver did not test it for the Y2K bug.

"It was created, at high cost, by an external and apparently incompetent third party," he told On Call.

Cane's company kept the tech team camping in the office for a couple of days, until it became clear nothing else would break.

"We returned to normal, though the consultants were maybe a bit more flush in the bank account," Cane reported. "Us poor salaried employees had to make do with time-off-in-lieu."

Have you worked tech support during a major event or holiday period? If so, click here to send email to On Call so we can share your story! ®