I worked in oil and gas in the ‘90s as a contractor in the tech space.
Booked off late December 1999 and early January 2000 two years in advance, and had it written into contracts. They tried to cancel my leave in December, lol. Most colleagues NYE plans were disrupted and while they were paid overtime, it wasn’t worth it. I had a party with 100 close friends on a family farm and listened on a shortwave radio to hear that New Zealsnd hadn’t been disrupted. The jelly wrestling then began.
Seriously, the teams working on Y2K defects fixed lots of stuff in embedded systems, finance and HR tools, control systems and the like.
The Y2K team’s goal was to correct 99.999% of defects, and they estimated having up to 3 life threatening incidents after the date change, and lots more less critical issues.
In the wash up, I heard of only one potentially life threatening incident, when a pump control system errored out and filled a major harbour with oil.
Three years later, during a business crisis, I discovered a critical backup system for business data had not run its schedule on 1 January 2000 or subsequently. Cost at least a couple billion dollars of losses to investors, due to the ensuing crisis in reporting, lol.
Booked off late December 1999 and early January 2000 two years in advance, and had it written into contracts. They tried to cancel my leave in December, lol. Most colleagues NYE plans were disrupted and while they were paid overtime, it wasn’t worth it. I had a party with 100 close friends on a family farm and listened on a shortwave radio to hear that New Zealsnd hadn’t been disrupted. The jelly wrestling then began.
Seriously, the teams working on Y2K defects fixed lots of stuff in embedded systems, finance and HR tools, control systems and the like.
The Y2K team’s goal was to correct 99.999% of defects, and they estimated having up to 3 life threatening incidents after the date change, and lots more less critical issues.
In the wash up, I heard of only one potentially life threatening incident, when a pump control system errored out and filled a major harbour with oil.
Three years later, during a business crisis, I discovered a critical backup system for business data had not run its schedule on 1 January 2000 or subsequently. Cost at least a couple billion dollars of losses to investors, due to the ensuing crisis in reporting, lol.