That time when Y2K turned into Y M I here?

Twenty years ago today I was sitting alone in an office at Monongahela Power Company's Fairmont headquarters, catching up on some not-so-important work, watching the power outage reporting system tick down toward zero and hoping that every computer in the world didn't crash at midnight when the dreaded Y2K finally arrived.

(I may also have been playing Solitaire on the company computer, but please don’t tell.)

I had a bad case of the flu but my boss insisted I drive over here from Hagerstown, Md., and be available to answer the flood of media calls that we were expecting as midnight arrived. A computer glitch that had something to do with the number of digits used to display the year in date formats had threatened to blow up every computer in the world when the calendar rolled over from the six-digit 12.31.99 to the eight-digit 01.01.2000.

So it was that on the last New Year’s Eve of the millennium, after hours of doing virtually nothing of value, I turned on a 13-inch TV/VCR combo that sat on a credenza in the office and watched the new year begin in places like Korea, Japan, Australia and other distant time zones where today was already tomorrow, waiting for the phone to ring and pleased to see that the computer catastrophe we all feared had failed to materialize.

As night fell, I think I called in to my supervisor to report the relevant statistics:

Number of computer crashes worldwide: 0.

Number of Mon Power customers without service: 0.

Number of media calls I received: 0.

The event had turned into such a waste of time that I was seriously considering dragging my flu-infected body out to my car and driving back to Maryland when, around 11 p.m. or so, I got a call from the local TV station requesting a live on-camera interview, which would air a minute or two before midnight. I agreed, of course, and a while later a young woman who couldn’t have been more than a week out of college showed up with a camera and a microphone to interview me.

She wanted me to go outside -- without a coat – on a hill overlooking the office so the name of the company would be visible in the background, so she dragged me up to the Giant Eagle parking lot next door. My nose was running, I was sneezing intermittently and I think I was shaking uncontrollably in 10-degree weather.

You always want to look your best for a live on-camera interview.

After we got up the hill, she informed me that we had to wait a few minutes for the station to break away from its national coverage for a “cut-in” segment during which she would ask me about Y2K. When the time came and she gave me the signal, I managed to tell her without sneezing that everything was fine, there were no power outages anywhere in our territory and all of the computers were working perfectly, thank you very much. I was ready to head back toward the office when, out of the blue, she asked me to predict what gas prices would be like in the year 2000.

It was such a stupid question I’m sure I must have hesitated before answering, all the while hoping my nose wouldn’t start to drip and trying to think of something intelligent to say. I didn’t know if she was asking about gasoline prices or natural gas prices, but it didn’t really matter because we were the power company. We sold electricity, not gasoline or natural gas, so I said something like, “I really couldn’t say. We don’t sell gas.”

And that was the end of the interview.

I had driven for two and a half hours with a bad case of flu on a freezing cold day to sit in an office, stare at a computer screen and watch TV from late morning until 11:58 p.m., so I could stand shivering in the cold and tell one reporter who didn’t know what she was taking about that everything was going to be fine. Everything except me, that is. I still had to drive home.

That was the night when Y2K became Y M I here? For all the hoopla, anxiety, fear, years of planning, terrifying stories in the media about the end of the world and millions of hours of work put in by engineers and computer specialists around the world, Y2K was without a doubt the biggest non-story of the millennium.

And I was there to witness it all...which turned out to be all of nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. It did provide me with a good story to write a blog about on the last day of the 2010s...and so I did. Tomorrow begins the 2020s, which I hope are a better decade for all of us. Only time will tell.

So Happy New Year, friends. See you around the corner in the two-ohs.