At the time, I thought that the panic was the most idiotic thing imaginable. I explained and argued with people until I was blue in the face about how nothing was going to happen. I made a bunch of $20 bets to that end but didn’t have the heart to collect on any of them. Got myself banned from a few Y2K forums and chat rooms for telling them all what a bunch of Chicken Little fools they were pre-Y2K and doing the “I told you so” thing afterward.
I was right here on SDMB.
Remember the Internet was supposed to wink out of existence at midnight. Wow, 10 years I can’t believe it.
I was posting on Y2K boards, baiting and mocking the TEOTWAWKI doomsayers before, during and after.
I had fun pulling Ed Yourdon’s personal chain a few times, and one of my best posts was a takeoff on his TimeBomb 2000. The people on those boards were so sincere and so gullible, and many of the STILL think they helped saved the world, even though countries that were so disorganized they did almost nothing (Italy, e.g.) had no worse outcomes.
Interestingly, I can still search for those posts and find 'em. Sobering.
Lotta money got made off that crisis and I’m still a little bitter I didn’t cash in on it.
I have determined to do better and make more financial hay while the AGW hysteria sun is shining, although I have become much nicer about expressing my cynicism over Great Causes. AGW will take longer to blow over anyway, so I have more time; the cool thing about Y2K was the absolute date for the whole thing to be exposed as typical Great Cause mass hysteria.
I filled the bath tub with water. Otherwise I did nothing. I felt sure that I could survive the summer weather without electricity, if necessary, for a few days.
I had a coworker whose wife listened to ultra-rightwing radio preachers who had her convinced that life as we know it was about to end. Said coworker laid in supplies of weapons, ammo, and beef jerky. Every time I see him, I’m tempted to ask if he’s still eating the jerky.
As for me and my sweetie - we did what we always do on NYE - we were asleep before 11. Oh yeah, we party hard. 
This is incorrect, by the way. A century is any period of 100 years and there is nothing incorrect about defining a new century as starting with Jan 1 2000, regardless of whether or not there was a year 0. The calendar has been revised any number of times to reflect more accurately how many “revolutions” we’ve made around the sun anyway (and there are various ways to define that), so neither is Jan 1 2001 the exact start of “the” 21st century. Finally, tying one’s smugness to someone too ignorant to know of the existence of zero seems a marginal choice for claiming superiority. But I digress…
…btw how great was your millennial celebration? Missed the party, did we?
I spent New Year’s Eve where I always spend it: at home. That night I did stay up past midnight for a change, watching the news to see if any problems would occur anywhere. At one point there was a report that the cash registers had failed at the PX at a military base in Guam. Well, OK then.
I’m old enough to remember when computers were exotic and home computers unheard of; we nevertheless had electricity, water came out of the taps, groceries sold food, so I didn’t imagine all that would blink out of existence because of software bugs. Nevertheless I filled a few large containers with water and bought a 20-roll pack of toilet paper just in case. I still buy toilet paper in bulk; that’s the only change Y2K made in my life.
Y2K also made it really easy to remember my start date at my current employer: January 4 2000. The HR woman who gave me the date joked I would start then “if we’re all still here”.
I ensured that we had fuel for our Coleman lantern, a good supply of firewood, and enough canned food to keep us fed for a week. Which meant I didn’t even have to buy any extra food, as we’ve a week’s of misc. canned food just from sheer inertia.
My renter, who occupied my old farmhouse, filled his basement with huge drums of dried beans, enough canned foods to feed his family for a few years, bottled water, a generator, weapons, extra bibles, and Og knows what else.
You are E-vile, Sir.
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I was at a really good party. Was living in Silicon Valley at the time, and on the whole we weren’t too worried.
I spent the night at Tipitinas in New Orleans, listening to two of the worlds finest, funkiest bands (The Meters and the Subdudes) and enjoying an open (wide open!!!) bar.
The music ended around 5 am, and after that I headed to the airport to catch my 8 am flight back home. Naturally I passed out (I had been in New Orleans for 4 days by that point, and had not really slept at all, despite having a realy nice room that I had to pay a fortune for) at the gate and slept soundly thru the boarding announcements.
When I finally woke up, I explained what had happened to the good people from Delta Airlines, and as everyone else was apparently afraid of flying on 1/1/00 I was promptly on the next (virtually empty) flight home, and was actually bumped to First Class without them ever bothering to takie my miles for the upgrade!!!
As mentioned, it just happens that I have experience now in checking both items.
Suffice to say: I found the evidence overwhelming then that Y2K was not going to be a disaster. The evidence for Anthropogenic Global Warming is overwhelming, it is silly to deny it. What is being discussed is what level of preparation and mitigation should be enough to deal with it.
I was in central Oregon waiting for the Soviet ICBMs to freak out and end the world. OK I wasn’t *really *expecting that, but I was at mom’s house that year around an awesome bonfire. I’d also bought some preparations, but only because it’s a good thing to have and I needed an excuse. My great grandma died the next day, probably thinking she’d made it to the 21st century now, she could pass on. Too bad she was a year off 
Hey, I did say I was 13. Well, no, that’s wrong, I was 12. Not that that excuses me, of course, but I did at least grow out of feeling like I knew everything.
I was gloating. The IT management smooth talkers (bullshit artists) at my organization had done some empire building and secured a nice budget for their Y2K projects. In a planning meeting I suggested that we had no problems with our mainframe systems - the first sys prog we had wrote 2 routines, one batch and one online, that every program written since used to do all date calculations. Both routines were Y2K compliant even though they were 15 years old.
I was mocked for my assurances but they were correct. I don’t think we changed a line of code but we pissed away a lot of money looking for changes to make. My stock went up and the CEO and his deputy ended up moving along.
I was fixing software, staving off the end of the world, thus saving all your lives. No need to thank me.
Actually, I really was fixing broken software - it was a locally-serious problem, but nothing earth-shattering - warehouse picklists for orders placed in the last week or two of 99 might never have made it to the front of the queue (00 taking precedence), statements sent to customers at the end of January 2000 might have chastised them for being a century late in paying, etc.
One or two things that were difficult to predict or test still broke and needed an urgent patch and we also fell victim to the much lesser-known Y2K+1 bug the following year (caused by a philosophical disagreement between Microsoft drivers for xBase tables and everyone else’s interpretation of the xBase standard)
I was partying on the roof of our apartment building, 4 blocks from Times Square, desperately hoping to see the lights in Manhattan all go out at once at midnight. Damn it all.
I so want to see a linkie, see exactly how humbled these people were, and the curiosity of what they’re talking about 10 years hense. (If the board’s still around now, one would think that’s a niche board)
One would think that’s just one midnight, after all, rough estimation says there’s about a 4 or 5 time zone difference between Muscat and London, so which midnight are you counting?
I’m amazed at a few things: firstly, all the hordes of users now on the 'net who weren’t even Internet users yet on the day in question (in my mind, anyone who first logged on the Internet after April, 1994 (when I first got on the 'net) is a newbie ); and secondly the many replies in this thread of people they knew who believed Y2K would happen (including some Dopers themselves) and that Global Catastrophe ™ would result. I figured it was just a blowing up of the lunatic fringe to make it seem larger than it was.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: one can never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
I was on an archeological expedition at the Temple of the Sun in a secret valley near Machu Picchu during that event. The world was in danger, but not from what most people expected. It still is not safe for me to disclose the details for the fate of the world could still swing the other way in a few years.
I did what I always did- went to the Red Wings game. But then, instead of stopping at the bar to celebrate the stroke of midnight, I went to the Post Office where my mom worked. Seems that someone had to be on duty in case the sorting machines failed, and she wanted me there to fix them. :smack: Whatever.
They did have this digital clock in the lobby that counted down the days, hours, minutes and seconds to the year 2000. So my mom, one clerk and I watched the clock count down, started up the machines to make sure they worked, and went home.