New Year's Eve 1999 was supposed to be the Prince song.
"Say, say, 2000-00, party over / Oops, out of time / So tonight I'm gonna party like it's 1999 ..."
If you listen to all of the words, Prince is singing about the end of the world, so he proclaims you might as well party like it's 1999.
Prince released "1999" in 1982. So for 17 years ... really since my birth in the 1960s – I had planned to party Dec. 31, 1999. Party hard.
After all a new century, a new millennium, seemed like the time to party like the chorus of Prince's song promised. True, the new century and new millennium technically started with 2001 but it's like the odometer on a car – we note the change from 99,999 to 100,000 miles not 100,000 to 100,001. Same with 2000.
It was gonna be big. Celebration. Friends. Family. Party on. Why not? I was still in my 30s. Adios, 1900s! Hello, 2000!
That was before Y2K. Or the Year 2000 problem, as no one called it at the time.
In the months leading up to Jan. 1, 2000, people became concerned that computers would read the 00 at the end of the year as 1900 rather than 2000. The inability to distinguish between 1900 and 2000 could adversely affect every industry and service using computers from banks to airlines to traffic signals to personal computers to newsrooms. Every computer could possibly malfunction at midnight, Jan. 1, 2000.
Even with computer programmers and companies preparing for the potential Y2K glitch, estimates ranged from the hundreds of millions to hundreds of billions in damages and could take anywhere from days to months to repair.
No one knew what to expect.
Unless you were in the news business.
You knew you'd likely be working like it's 1999. Not partying like it.
Every reporter, editor, page designer, etc., was scheduled to work New Year's Eve.
The entire newsroom would be ready even if the worst Y2K predictions happened and we wouldn't be able to get anything on our new website or prepare anything for print the next day.
Or something in-between might happen and we'd compare the glitches with things that ran smoothly.
Or nothing would happen and the full team would report that nothing happened.
The majority of us in the newsroom thought it was overkill. A ridiculous overuse of manpower for something that may or may not happen and that we may or may not even have the capability to report on.
My assignment was covering the New Year's Eve festivities at Wild Adventures Theme Park.
Instead of spending time with my wife and friends, partying in the new year, I spent New Year's Eve 1999 standing alone in a crowd of strangers, listening to a band playing – I do not recall what band – with a notepad in hand, waiting for the countdown to doom or a happy new year.
At midnight, nothing Y2K happened. People cheered. Lovers kissed. People greeted one another. People toasted. I half recall shaking some guy's hand before I started walking to my car in the parking lot.
The world had been spared. My decades-long plan to party like it's 1999 had been lost.
We all met back in the newsroom full of glum spirits and a mutual sense of I told you so. We filed our reports about how Y2K had no affect on South Georgia. And we scattered.
I arrived home at about 2:30 a.m., wished my sleepy wife a Happy New Year, watched a couple of "Twilight Zone" reruns and fell asleep.
Waking the next morning, Jan. 1, 2000, I watched national reports similar to our local ones. Y2K, thankfully, was a bust. Nothing really happened here, there or anywhere.
The world was safe. Nothing horrible happened that day.
Or so we thought.
Network news shifted away from the nothing of Y2K to a story coming out of Russia.
Russian President Boris Yeltsin had resigned and appointed a successor ... some guy named Vladimir Putin.
Little did we know.
Dean Poling is an editor with The Valdosta Daily Times and editor of The Tifton Gazette.
"Say, say, 2000-00, party over / Oops, out of time / So tonight I'm gonna party like it's 1999 ..."
If you listen to all of the words, Prince is singing about the end of the world, so he proclaims you might as well party like it's 1999.
Prince released "1999" in 1982. So for 17 years ... really since my birth in the 1960s – I had planned to party Dec. 31, 1999. Party hard.
After all a new century, a new millennium, seemed like the time to party like the chorus of Prince's song promised. True, the new century and new millennium technically started with 2001 but it's like the odometer on a car – we note the change from 99,999 to 100,000 miles not 100,000 to 100,001. Same with 2000.
It was gonna be big. Celebration. Friends. Family. Party on. Why not? I was still in my 30s. Adios, 1900s! Hello, 2000!
That was before Y2K. Or the Year 2000 problem, as no one called it at the time.
In the months leading up to Jan. 1, 2000, people became concerned that computers would read the 00 at the end of the year as 1900 rather than 2000. The inability to distinguish between 1900 and 2000 could adversely affect every industry and service using computers from banks to airlines to traffic signals to personal computers to newsrooms. Every computer could possibly malfunction at midnight, Jan. 1, 2000.
Even with computer programmers and companies preparing for the potential Y2K glitch, estimates ranged from the hundreds of millions to hundreds of billions in damages and could take anywhere from days to months to repair.
No one knew what to expect.
Unless you were in the news business.
You knew you'd likely be working like it's 1999. Not partying like it.
Every reporter, editor, page designer, etc., was scheduled to work New Year's Eve.
The entire newsroom would be ready even if the worst Y2K predictions happened and we wouldn't be able to get anything on our new website or prepare anything for print the next day.
Or something in-between might happen and we'd compare the glitches with things that ran smoothly.
Or nothing would happen and the full team would report that nothing happened.
The majority of us in the newsroom thought it was overkill. A ridiculous overuse of manpower for something that may or may not happen and that we may or may not even have the capability to report on.
My assignment was covering the New Year's Eve festivities at Wild Adventures Theme Park.
Instead of spending time with my wife and friends, partying in the new year, I spent New Year's Eve 1999 standing alone in a crowd of strangers, listening to a band playing – I do not recall what band – with a notepad in hand, waiting for the countdown to doom or a happy new year.
At midnight, nothing Y2K happened. People cheered. Lovers kissed. People greeted one another. People toasted. I half recall shaking some guy's hand before I started walking to my car in the parking lot.
The world had been spared. My decades-long plan to party like it's 1999 had been lost.
We all met back in the newsroom full of glum spirits and a mutual sense of I told you so. We filed our reports about how Y2K had no affect on South Georgia. And we scattered.
I arrived home at about 2:30 a.m., wished my sleepy wife a Happy New Year, watched a couple of "Twilight Zone" reruns and fell asleep.
Waking the next morning, Jan. 1, 2000, I watched national reports similar to our local ones. Y2K, thankfully, was a bust. Nothing really happened here, there or anywhere.
The world was safe. Nothing horrible happened that day.
Or so we thought.
Network news shifted away from the nothing of Y2K to a story coming out of Russia.
Russian President Boris Yeltsin had resigned and appointed a successor ... some guy named Vladimir Putin.
Little did we know.
Dean Poling is an editor with The Valdosta Daily Times and editor of The Tifton Gazette.
