IT team forced to camp in the office for days after Y2K bug found in boss's side project
- Reference: 1766734213
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/12/26/on_call/
- Source link:
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 199 he worked in the IT department at the UK branch of a "multinational booze purveyor."
Cane said he and his team felt confident.
[1]
"We spent much of the last two years testing and verifying everything, upgrading and replacing as needed," he told On Call.
[2]
[3]
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.
[4]
"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.
[5]User found two reasons – both of them wrong – to dispute tech support's diagnosis
[6]User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't
[7]Vendor's secret 'fix' made critical app unusable during business hours
[8]Cabling survived dungeons and fish factories, until a lazy user took the network down
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.
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"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."
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I've already told this more than once, but the tale never gets old - well, it does get one older as years go by, but you get the point :)
That fateful night I was on duty, after a year and a half working on that Y2K project for a large bank.
Midnight passed without a hitch, and around 1 AM I went to the nearest ATM and checked my balance and latest account movements (not an account from the bank I was working for). There was an interest credit of around the equivalent of 3000€. Resisting the urge to withdraw it there and then, I went back, showed the slip to my co-workers and wondered what would happen from then on. At 8 AM, after an uneventful night on the job, I went down and checked my balance again. Without a trace of that earlier payment, it now showed the correct and, unfortunately, much smaller interest deposit...
I bet someone's night was a lot more eventful than mine
"in December 199 he worked in the IT department"
Wow, a true greybeard. I'm remembering a video of a monk teaching someone how to use a book... And it wasn't called the UK back then, but I'm sure they had huge booze purveyors, even multinational ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pithos
"And when you need a crane to move your booze, it's time to admit you have a problem!" Arthur, Legacy of Time (quoted as close as I can recall)
Re: "in December 199 he worked in the IT department"
It was the Y2C bug back then.
Re: "in December 199 he worked in the IT department"
A [1]Meux & Co's Horse Shoe Brewery like event?
INVALID DATE DETECTED. RESETTING SYSTEMS... SYSTEMS RESET... FERMENTATION THERMAL RUNAWAY DETECTED. UNINTENDED UNSCHEDULED DECONTAINMENT IMMINENT. BRACE BRACE BRACE!
*SPLOOOSH*
Operator: I've always dreamed of going out like this! >glug glug glug< >glurp<
[Sorry/thanks Simon!]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Beer_Flood
Ah, the great Y2K scare
I remember spending months on client sites checking any and everything that could possibly go wrong, making some updates here and there to coding commands that had been deprecated and replacing them with the newer "accepted" ones.
And I had it easy. As a Notes developer, in those days Notes belonged to IBM and, say what you want about IBM and how it markets its products - or fails to do so (and I have already vented a lot in these hallowed pages) - one thing you cannot take away is the fact that IBM made Domino/Notes a solid, resilient platform.
So Y2K came and went and I didn't get any panicked calls from customers because of Y2K-related issues.
But the groundwork had to have been done.
Re: Ah, the great Y2K scare
My largest client at the time was a significnt polymer compound manufacturer. I wrote and maintained their Production System, works orders and the like. When I asked the MD about their Y2K policy, including embedded control gadgets, his response was "We don't give a toss, if it breaks, we'll go manual. The Production System's good, right?" - which it was. Now that's unflustered contingency planning :)
POS
Back then I was writing point-of-sale software, and though everything I wrote handled years as four digits, there was plenty of legacy code that needed to be tweaked (not least of which the data being sent to upstream AS/400s).
The process was simple enough - after agreeing on a format change with the AS/400 developer, I simply added the appropriate century depending on the year - 19xx for years greater than 30, and 20xx for years less than or equal to 30. The oldest date record at the time was 1939 (the DoB of the oldest staff member at any of our customers), so no issues there.
If any of that stuff is still running in five years' time from now, well, fugg'em for not having upgraded in the past quarter-century :-P
Re: POS
All I will say to that is there is nothing so permanent as a temporary fix.
So they are probably still running some form of that code, or it is sitting idling until it detects the “wrong” value.
Who knows?
Y2KY Jelly...
...making 4 digits fit into the space of 2..
At least Cane was Able to to figure out it was a screensaver problem that caused the PCs to crash.
You actually posted that! I don't Adam and Eve it!
That doesn't seem to be "not testing against the Y2K bug" but "not testing against an end condition". If it was Y2K'd-bugged it would have gone from "1 second to..." to "36524 days to...." It was actually *CORRECTLY* functioning, showing a negative amount of unelapsed time to a past event. The 1st January *IS* minus one days before 31st December the previous year.
Regominised as Cane because he wasn't Abel?
To paraphrase Michelle (talking to Fry): Why must you analyze everything with your relentless logic? Nothing matters but our love of a good story.
+1
I discovered that my client at the time had a Y10K problem - years were 4 digits. I offered them a fix, complete with a money back guarantee if it failed, but they declined.
Working in IT for a bank our small team took it in turns to be on site for the duration but all of us were still expected to be on call as we all had our own sub-areas of experience and expertise including knowing the best team member to contact for any given type of issue (lot of in-house bespoke software in play). Had a decent remuneration in return ramping up to quad time for on site hours and double time for on-call time if called upon, single time if not. But thankfully, due to our due diligence, the event passed us by without a hitch so the only downside was having to moderate our celebratory Y2K drink.
Now, about those neutrino hits on the computer core causing the occasional inexplicable system failure ...