My Y2K story

Gears, Clock, Process
Now that I came to think about it, Y2K has changed the course of my life - and not for the better. In the spring of 1997 I was recruited by a head-hunter and left my programmer/analyst position at a medium-sized IT shop for the lure of the big name. Where is that bang-head-against-wall spot? Back then, the year when I would have retired with an indexed company pension was nowhere on the horizon, and the very notion of retirement was an unfathomable concept. So I went.

After three months of no work assignment, and not even a computer on my desk, I, like many others in the newly-hired contingent started questioning our raison-d'etre. Some were organizing fake meetings just to keep talking lest they fall asleep. (Some did). Some left. And then things started moving because Y2K was coming and we, like hundred others, had been corralled so that the company could bid on, execute and profit from the expected demand for Y2K contracts.

I landed in what was to become the Y2K Centre of Competency of ISM, a subsidiary of IBM. In retrospect this project was far more interesting that I was able to realize at the time. There was a type A project manager overseeing the effort. She was competent and demanding, and had lots of good ideas to discuss after 5pm, oblivious to the daunting (for me) fact that day care centers were charging $1 per minute of delay. The centre was to be built around a Y2K tool acquired by IBM once they bought Legasys, a small company in Kingston, Ont. Legasys was created by a bunch of bright and entrepreneurial Ph.D's who created this tool that was able to detect date related hot spots in code. The hot spot was either patched automatically or flagged for the tool analyst to analize and fix. There were a few bumps along the road, but the tool was churning millions of lines of COBOL code and the work was interesting. We went to Kingston a few times (and marveled at the large private offices the Legasys types occupied), and Kingston came to us (probably shivering at the long ranges of rat-gray cubicles that made up the centre). Processes had to be set up, the team had to be formed, equipment procured, the tool installed, the loads of code needed to be processed, thick manuals were written and consulted, results had to be interpreted, packaged and delivered, communication channels had to be in place with all involved. There was the delivery team - the client facing people, and the rest of us, tool specialists, toiling in the centre. There were a few layers of management above us. And it was believed that a few houses in Kingston were about to see lavish renovations...

Now I remember few details about the work, in part because we are not even supposed to be mentioning what we did professionally 10 or more years ago - no matter how formative those experiences were. I do remember the big night though, as we were on call, reason being and I had to forgo a Caribbean vacation with my family because of that.

Y2K made careers for some. But not for my driven boss - she got a rare A+, but then she was badly back stabbed by an upper manager and decided to leave. I still remember how dismayed she was, telling me all this. The rest of us moved on to other projects once Y2K became mission accomplished and did not keep in touch. I regret I did not exercise my archivist penchant so now  I cannot find that thick, white-covered Y2K compliance manual! But, not to be completely undone, I kept the LS/2000 Technical Overview and User Guide explaining what the Year 2000 problem is and detailing concepts such as Date Grouping, Date Tracing, Hot Spot, Multi-Windowing, Sliding Window, Intrinsic Functions, Surrounding Context...

I wander what has become of all those other many and precious procedures, manuals, tests, reports and files. It was a lot of intellectual capital that has been not acknowledged and leveraged but rapidly disappeared into both real and virtual garbage-bins - instead of taking its place as a celebrated episode of the yet to be written modern history of IT.

2020 May 20
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