New Year's Eve of 1999, when airplanes were going to fall from the sky


It's New Year's Eve Day 2020 as I write this, and my mind is drifting back to the year 1999, when planes were supposed to suddenly fall from the sky, because computers didn't know how to write 2000.

I was there, living in Glendale, a suburb of Phoenix, which is where I still am, and had been teaching computer graphics for a few years. And while I'm not by any stretch of the imagination a "computer guy" (I just taught graphic design on Apple computers), I knew enough about how computers work to know that a small glitch like that would have been patched a long time ago, and besides, airplanes don't just suddenly start falling from the sky because the computer doesn't know what day it is. But I'd learned enough about how nervous people felt about computers if they didn't understand them to become sympathetic, and even gentle (which is rare among people who know how computers work, I know!). I'd like to believe that I'm still that guy.

Historically, the beginning of a new millennium has tended to freak out a lot of people. I'm a history fan, and I know that it wasn't unusual for people to give away all of their earthly goods, go sit on a hillside somewhere, and wait for the end of the world. It had to be something of a disappointment when all they had to was to just go back to work the next day, and probably had to walk, or ask for a ride.

It will be 2021 in a few hours, and I can't help but worry about the people who are wondering "what if?". Speaking for myself, I'm confident that tomorrow will be just another day, and I plan on getting a good night's sleep. I've always celebrated the New Year starting when it hits my hometown of Minneapolis, and when I lived in California I celebrated for Phoenix. Tonight I plan on starting with Rio, and then Nova Scotia, hoping that I can stay awake. I'm not as young as I used to be, but I've never been a late-night person, anyway.

I really don't recall if I stayed awake until midnight in 1999, but I know that I didn't go look for planes falling out of the sky. But I know that a lot of people did.
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