Y2K

Remember the end of 1999? Doomsayers predicting the end of the world as we knew it? I remember reading in a newspaper that the US would be monitoring New Zealand and Australia as we passed through midnight, on the grounds that at 20 and 18 hours ahead of California respectively, they'd get some advance information on what problems might occur.

At 11 PM that night I was running a trivia game on my own chat server. My own in the sense that the server was sitting two feet to my left. I used to get great ping times with the server that close! The game was proceeding wonderfully (I know how to work a roomful of trivia players) and, as midnight crept closer, we were joking around about how close we were to the Y2K problem. The temptation to stop the chat service was irresistible; I stopped it at the stroke of midnight and restarted it about 10 seconds later.

As history has shown nothing much happened that night and I certainly don't imagine that US authorities were even monitoring my chat server but one or two of the American players did seem to believe something had gone seriously wrong!