Y2K | TheaterFire

[-]

nucl3ar0ne@reddit

I worked for a company as a test engineer at the time. It was my job to ensure nothing went wrong. Had to basically check with the manufacturer of every single piece of electronic equipment we had.

[-]

alwaysmanders@reddit

What's the documentary? I'd love to watch it. It was such a non-issue for me. I have zero effs and would've been really screwed if something had actually happened. LOL

[-]

Most_Beyond9318@reddit (OP)

It's actually a docuseries called Dark Side of the 90s. Y2K was one of the eps. I found it on Disney+. Liking it so far.

[-]

PatchworkGirl82@reddit

Not at home, but my mom ran the computer labs in our school district, and she spent a lot of time working with a tech guy to make sure everything would work once the calendars flipped over.

I used to go along with her on weekends, so I could play games and wander the dark and silent hallways (which reminds me, I need to buy my ticket to the Backrooms movie)

[-]

American_Greed@reddit

My parents went to Fred Meyer, but didn't know what to buy so they came back with a couple bags of chips and kind of laughed about it saying "oh well!"

[-]

AetheriaInBeing@reddit

My dad had a computer before I was born. We mostly just laughed at anyone panicking.

[-]

My dad worked behind the scenes at a bank data center for yeeeeears to make sure it didn't happen. We prepped just in case, but we also knew all of the blood, sweat, and tears all the Y2k teams put into it across the world, and we're pretty confident

[-]

raisedbydogsnhippies@reddit

My dad had 5 gallon buckets of flour, salt, sugar, and rice stored as well as some water cubies and a couple of cases of MRE's.

[-]

_Internet_Hugs_@reddit

My parents are Preppers. They had a field day. Absolutely giddy with the thought of societal collapse.

[-]

AlchemistMustang@reddit

My buddy's family had money. He brought over the DC and we played Soul Caliber and ate pizza all night. Woke up at 6 to drive to the Orange Bowl and ate a DQP and an Oreo McFlurry to start 2000. No regrets

[-]

dontletyourcrownslip@reddit

gif

[-]

fromthedarqwaves@reddit

I had already left home so I don’t know. I personally didn’t do anything. I bought a wallet case that said “2000” on it.

[-]

Tetris_Pete@reddit

gif

[-]

dontletyourcrownslip@reddit

Haha this is so great

[-]

dontletyourcrownslip@reddit

I tried to prepare. By taking my $250 out of the bank and keeping it at home before I could take it back to the bank the following year. I was 16. Had some friends over. In my basement, we watched with anticipation as the ball dropped and waited for everything to implode. You all know how it turned out.... 🥳

[-]

OogaBooganaitor@reddit

I was in the militia here in Canada. We received pistol training (was not part of training at the time for non-commissioned members) and underwent some basic arrest and civil disobedience training. Our little unit of 15 people in a small prairie city was supplied with a slip tank full of fuel as well as a whole pallet of ammunition including anti tank rockets and plenty of belted ammunition. We were to wait for a code word delivered by phone, or to report in if there were any major disruptions to power, telephone, etc.

But I got super drunk and wasn’t anywhere near my phone so lucky for me the world didn’t end because showing up at lunchtime for the apocalypse is a bad look and would have made my commanding officer doubt my commitment.

[-]

Dry-Discount-9426@reddit

I lost my virginity.

[-]

burgundyblue@reddit

No. My parents didn’t believe anything bad would happen. They used to be logical and reasonable. Then Fox News happened.

[-]

TexasRN1@reddit

I was a nurse at work that night. We were all embracing for the computers to crash. And nothing happened. Phew.

[-]

digitaljestin@reddit

Fun fact: more systems failed from Y2K bugs in 2020 than did in 2000.

A common fix for Y2K bugs was to treat any two digit date less than 20 as in the 2000s and any date 20 or higher as the 1900s. The idea was that surely these systems would be replaced by 2020. Not all were, and neither did anyone remember to "fix the Y2K fix" before the long-delayed bugs finally took effect.

It was almost poetic how at the stroke of midnight bugs started popping up; the very first problems of an extremely shitty year.

[-]

shnigybrendo@reddit

Wait... Is that how the virus got out?!

[-]

digitaljestin@reddit

Damn, that's just stupid enough to be plausible.

Still, COVID19 was in the news before 2020. I mean, the 19 comes from the year of its discovery.

[-]

Uhohtallyho@reddit

When did they kick the can down the line to next because I've got to make some plans before the next global distaster.

[-]

digitaljestin@reddit

No clue. 2040, maybe? That'd be my guess, since it's after the 2038 problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

If you didn't know, we have another Y2K-like problem coming up in less than 12 years. This one is slightly harder to explain to the general public, so I doubt it will get the same attention even though it's probably a bigger problem.

[-]

mmoonbelly@reddit

Maybe it needs branding : the Pi problem 3.14?

For the evangelicals : the stop exhorting cash at collection issue!(luke 3:14)

[-]

EmmalouEsq@reddit

My dad was up watching the new year ring in across the world just to make sure things weren't about to melt down. Plus he got to see lots of fireworks

[-]

trainwreckhappening@reddit

Y parents sold a lot not y2k preparedness crap in thei gift shop. (Actually it didn't sell, it was a terrible decision to stock it but it was a joke anyway and they took only the minimum order so it didn't really hurt)

[-]

Mooseboots1999@reddit

I woke up around 10am on New Years Day, and surveyed the hotel room me and my buddies crashed in. We had half of a ham sandwich and 2-3 warm Coors Lights. I thought to myself, “If it is Armageddon out there, we are so screwed…”

[-]

Starboard_Pete@reddit

Not to my knowledge, but my dad would drop random facts around then like “purslane is highly nutritious if food is scarce,” and “if you bury Jersusalem artichokes in an abandoned field they’ll look like weeds when they sprout and most people won’t know the root is a food source.” He uh….put some thought into the collapse of distribution channels. Lol

[-]

miseeker@reddit

I was 44. I didn’t do a thing. I knew it was a hoax to sell shit and scare people,like most things are.

[-]

rigidlynuanced1@reddit

I know an engineer who bought an old diesel tractor and ran a belt drive to the house and created a diesel powered generator that his house could run on, just pull a lever. He enclosed the diesel tractor in a small His wife learned how to cook on a wood burning stove. Had 3, 100 gallon tanks of diesel. It was elaborate

[-]

ughyoujag@reddit

My mom and dad didn’t believe any of it, and they thought everyone was dumb. They’re hardly ever right like that

[-]

random9212@reddit

If nothing was done about it it would have been worse than it turned out to be. There were glitches that happened because of the bug but the patches applied in the lead up to the date stopped the worst of it.

[-]

ughyoujag@reddit

I just mean how it was going to impact us personally on an everyday. They thought it was a business problem that would be corrected and not a risk for societal collapse.

[-]

random9212@reddit

Then yes that was my thought on it at the time. "Smart people are working on it they will likely figure it out." Especially being on the west coast of North America and seeing as nothing happened in the rest of the world it was just another new years from what I remember.

[-]

ughyoujag@reddit

Except I was in Hawaii with a sexy marine I met on vacation. So not just another new years 😉

[-]

random9212@reddit

Well you definitely had more fun than me that night. Lol

[-]

ughyoujag@reddit

I did 🤭

[-]

el_pyrata@reddit

I started to get kind of paranoid a couple days before NYE, and I talked with my dad, who is a very sensible man. And he was just like, “it’s probably nothing”. I was like “yeah…but what if…” So then he and I went on a shopping trip. We got extra waters, batteries, canned goods, a new flashlight, and ammo. Lol

[-]

Vectors2_Final@reddit

No... but we all went over to my cousin's place and as the clock struck zero my cousin and I flipped the main breaker off and had our parents losing their shit for a minute.

[-]

Double-Tradition413@reddit

Hahahaha! That’s fantastic!

[-]

Sarah_Femme@reddit

I was at a house party in the sticks and their kids did the same, it was pretty funny, ngl.

[-]

lathamfalls@reddit

So bad but hilarious

[-]

beardedliberal@reddit

Lol. I did the same. Dad and uncle thought it was pretty funny, mum not so much.

[-]

Conscious_Home_4253@reddit

My mother unplugged the computer and the toaster, just in case. 😂

[-]

Most_Beyond9318@reddit (OP)

Now that I think about it, we did too!

[-]

piscian19@reddit

No. I was poor af. The idea of the banking system breaking down was only good news for me.

[-]

FoppyRETURNS@reddit

Where Is My Mind

[-]

Tetris_Pete@reddit

gif

[-]

punktualPorcupine@reddit

No one in my family cared.

[-]

FewConversation569@reddit

Not really prepped, but we all planned to stay the night at the family friend’s house where we celebrated new years. A friend from work that’s our age told me their family bought remote land in Tennessee and a camper with some other families just in case shit hit the fan.

[-]

Ardilla914@reddit

My best friend’s mom thought the world was ending and the only place she would be safe was Albuquerque, NM. Moved across the country a few months before Y2K. She also thought she had a Time Machine in her closet so she might not have been the most stable.

[-]

BuffaloRedshark@reddit

I sat in front of my pc watching the clock. Then probably got drunk as I was in college.

[-]

small___potatoes@reddit

We drank vodka in a car then watched Deliverance in my friends basement lol

[-]

tfaboo@reddit

Lol wut? 😆

[-]

small___potatoes@reddit

gif

[-]

tfaboo@reddit

🤣

[-]

GenericDave65@reddit

I was working at a grocery store and by the end of the year we were selling water by the pallet. Just lined them up and down the aisles. It was crazy.

My wife’s family were preppers. I started dating her in 2004 and her cabinets were filled with her parent’s dharma initiative food that was leftover from Y2K. They did it again in 2012 and every other doomsday scenario that has come and gone.

[-]

anOvenofWitches@reddit

gif

I watched Strange Days a ton

[-]

ModernDayMusetta@reddit

No, but I remember everyone kind of holding their breath when we were watching the ball drop on TV.

[-]

remoteworker9@reddit

No, in fact I don’t recall my parents even mentioning Y2K.

[-]

epyon9283@reddit

My dad bought a bunch of MREs

[-]

tfaboo@reddit

I was in college and at a y2k NYE party. Somebody played Prince 1999 and at midnight everyone in the neighborhood was cheering because the world didn't end. 🤣

[-]

fenderputty@reddit

I was at a rave on New Year’s Eve. First time doing X. First time at a rave. It was a massive but back then they still went to 4AM. Its was at the coliseum in LA and spanned into the sports arena (now La football club). Together as one

Anyway it was getting close to midnight. The crowd from the arena wanted to go see the countdown and fireworks. So they started to pour out and into the coliseum. There were riot crew at the top of the coliseum edge because it was getting a little out of hand. People started breaking through. DJ comes on, I can’t remember, says the LA Mayor was there. Raves were a hot button political issue. Everyone starts chanting fuck you. Ghetto birds flying overhead. Then the countdown and fireworks and music. All while the X was hitting me hard as fuck. 😂

What a night Y2K was

[-]

hybr_dy@reddit

Mom hoarded a bunch of food and bottled water. We weren’t allowed to go out.

[-]

scribblenator15@reddit

My uncle bought a composting toilet

[-]

sal101010@reddit

My dad did a bunch of the computer upgrades, which seemed to just be running a program and chucking a "Y2K Compliant" sticker on the machine.

What amused me was that apparently they failed to realise that burglar alarms had clocks and calendars in them so as we walked through town after celebrating midnight under the Chester clock (the second most-photographed clock in the UK!), it was to half the shops' alarms celebrating the millennium in their own noisy way 😆

[-]

DickWhittingtonsCat@reddit

Phish NYE Big Cypress. I know I’m not the only one. Like 77-85 is the wheelhouse for that band.

[-]

mrnoonan81@reddit

I worked at a grocery store in '99 and a woman was loading up with supplies and was trying to tell me how catastrophic it was going to be. She was not pleased that I was unconvinced and she got upset. When she was walking away she was shaking, saying "You'll see! You'll see!"

The next day a girl at school came to me and said "Sorry about my mom..."

[-]

Miami_Mice2087@reddit

there was a guy in our local paper who spent over $20k on prepper materials for his bunker. Some people are easily lead to hysterics...

[-]

rialucia@reddit

Omg I also worked in a grocery store as a bagger in 1999 and I can’t tell you how many packs of water bottles I loaded into carts. Good thing I had the strong back of a teenager.

[-]

Sofagirrl79@reddit

I was 20 and living with my ex boyfriend,I started drinking early in the afternoon and downed a six pack of Michelob (the good stuff in the dark brown bottles that wasn't light) and around 8pm thought it would be a good idea to take a nap to "refresh myself" for later

Ended up waking up at 2AM central time and was pissed 😡 I did set my VCR to record the Times square countdown but I missed a major event that I'll never see again unless I achieve immortality somehow and lived to see the year 3000 like Fry lol

[-]

Miami_Mice2087@reddit

i downloaded a windows update for my own computer and i turned off and unplugged everyone's computer. i was a teenager in college. my parents had no idea what to do. my parents' computer didn't need an update because it was from 1987 and was a literal tank that would survive an actual apocalypse. It didn't have an internet or a hard drive.

[-]

Herky_T_Hawk@reddit

Not in my household.

But I was working in a grocery store on New Year’s Eve 1999 until closing. That shift sucked. We sold tons of bottles of water(at least 10x of a normal day) along with other stuff at a higher volume.

[-]

2099AD@reddit

My aunt was one of the programmers who made sure "nothing happened." So I wasn't worried.

[-]

jamescockroft@reddit

One of my good, dear friends threw a big end of the world party for our punk rock crew, which had members from a handful of nearby towns and spanned about 6 or 7 years of age. Good group of folks, really.

One of the Hardcore guys decided to bring a gun. To a party with no one around but his good friends.

I marched up to him and told him to go lock it I. His car, that he was safe among friends, and etc. he got offended and things got tense.

We were chest to chest shouting at one another and our friends gathered around to yell “fight! Fight!”

After a few moments of that inanity, I stepped back, told my friend I loved him and gave him a big hug.

These days, we’re on different teams in many ways, and the internet says we hate each other. And when I see him, we hug and chat like the dear old friends we are.

[-]

violetstrainj@reddit

No, but I had a friend in college whose parents were hardcore about prepping for Y2K, and it really traumatized her, even though she was a junior in high school at the time. She still kept the last can of soup they’d hoarded until 2005. We threw a party the night she threw that can away, as sort of a “whoo! I survived my crazy parents!” celebration.

[-]

jrod259@reddit

I was with 20K or so people who watching Widespread Panic! Had enough shrooms and molly to be numb through society’s downfall.

Funny fact though, Panic played at Phillips Arena in Atlanta that night, and at the time Atlanta had a NHL team that played there. After the countdown, they did the goal horn and my buddy, thinking the world did end, 💩💩💩 his pants! Probably was the shrooms…

[-]

mightysockelf@reddit

My dad bought gas camping lanterns in case the power went out, and my mom broke out the box of hurricane supplies so we'd have food and water. Meanwhile, I was chilling on the family computer that I'd made sure was Y2K compliant, just to see what would happen to it at midnight (spoiler: nothing happened).

[-]

Apidaelia@reddit

My uncle worked at an investment firm, and he spent years of the 90s going through company code and fixing the bug. No other prep or worry was apparent in my family.

[-]

rideofthebasilisks@reddit

My buddy had a big house party. When midnight struck he flipped the breakers to the house. Good times

[-]

The_C0u5@reddit

My mom's boyfriend at the time did.

He bought an old Mennonite farmhouse and stocked up on canned and non-perishables.

Walked in the next day like I didn't spend every weekend for a month cleaning out his goat pens for goats he'd never need.

[-]

polygonalopportunist@reddit

I stocked up on booze and cigarettes

[-]

GarminTamzarian@reddit

"I got toilet paper and a laundry mango."

[-]

Rustymarble@reddit

My mom's electric company sent letters warning that there may be outages. She half-heartedly did some prepping. She got a weird industrial type grinder so we could make our own flour and she had some buckets of wheat and grains. We lived in the middle of nowhere (literally, an hour drive to anywhere) and she moved there somewhat intentionally. But that was the extent of her "prep". Mice ate into the mouse-proof containers years later.

I was recovering from the flu, but at a party anyway.

[-]

duckswtfpwn@reddit

I actually cut my teeth in computer programming to patch all of the custom Unibasic code for like 14 different customers. On January 3rd, I drove out to Vegas (from So Cal) to work on systems that the companies didn't think were a big deal to patch. I made a ton of money that year. Insane OT at that age. Especially since I was only 22 years old.

I wasn't worried about prepping for groceries or panicky about services, but I did know there would be small disruptions. It actually was a thing.

[-]

CommandAlternative10@reddit

My mom spent NYE at an emergency command station for a major financial institution. Not much happened because they had worked really hard for years to make sure nothing would happen. The problem was real.

[-]

TeutonJon78@reddit

2038 will be another similar year (assuming we are still a species with computers by then). 32-bit system rolls over and could cause similar issues as they were worried about in Y2K.

[-]

IllustriousGeneral12@reddit

I worked at a grocery store and the mad dash for bottled water was INSANE.

[-]

CokBlockinWinger@reddit

We had a huge party, I mean massive. Every one was so drunk by the time the clock struck 12 we all paused for like a millisecond, listened, and all went “YYYEEEEEEAAAAHHHHH!!!!!” and went back to partying.

[-]

OldSpotty@reddit

We partied in a dug-out basement with the power shut off so we wouldn't know if anything happened. Recorded an album on a battery-operated 4-track DAC.... It was all for the lulz though, half of is were IT professionals by then and knew what was (or wasn't) up.

[-]

Workamania@reddit

We installed the Windows 98 patches. That's it.

[-]

Global-Jury8810@reddit

I think that’s what we ended up doing too.

I still spent the evening backing up my pages on floppies. My mom (1957-) and Dad (1938-2017) didn’t do anything out of the ordinary and were skeptical of the whole y2k thing the entire time.

[-]

FoppyRETURNS@reddit

gif

[-]

AndrewInMN@reddit

My dad was a bit of a nut job and he bought a generator and some other stuff but he didn’t get too carried away as far as I remember. I don’t recall my mom being worried. (They were not together). I was at a party and smoked weed for the first time.

[-]

BreakfastBeerz@reddit

It was 21, I went out drinking.

[-]

FoppyRETURNS@reddit

gif

[-]

LAffaire-est-Ketchup@reddit

I was 19, I went out drinking at my ex girlfriend’s house with her Mum, and our other friends. Ex was on an exchange abroad. We called the exchange students parents at midnight, but since they were on the other side of the world, they were ahead of us by half a day.

[-]

catperson3000@reddit

This is also how I prepped.

[-]

Seven22am@reddit

I was 17. I stayed in drinking. In a friend’s uncle’s basement. Classic.

[-]

FoppyRETURNS@reddit

Other than some flashlights and beefaroni we were going to raw dog the end of the world.

[-]

Obi_Wan_Benobi@reddit

No. My mom was a programmer.

[-]

Lil_Brown_Bat@reddit

A documentary directed by Kyle Mooney, perhaps? 😉

[-]

jungle4john@reddit

Technically yes. My family had a consulting company doing Y2K upgrades and installs for companies. So yes, we "prepped" before new year's eve.

[-]

ashores@reddit

No, nor did I know anyone who did at the time. A few years later I went to a college friend's house and saw her mom's Y2K prep stash (I think in what was supposed to be a guest house but was just being used for storage) while we were gathering up camping supplies. Still had rows of toilet paper, canned goods, etc.

[-]

ace_11235@reddit

My dad was a software engineer for a very large bank and spent over a year prepping code, then was at work monitoring the systems that night.

[-]

Spartan04@reddit

No, only thing we did was shut off the family computer a little before midnight, just in case. I remember feeling a small amount of apprehension right before midnight though, I was pretty sure nothing would happen but couldn't be 100% sure. Then midnight passed and everything was fine.

A funny thing is that I actually was affected by Y2K in a way. I worked at a movie theater at the time and it was an older theater that used a DOS computer with some old software on it to enter all our ticket and concession financials for each day and transmit them to home office (via dialup of course). The software did not recognize 2000 as the year so we lost our ability to use that computer after the new year. We knew it was coming but we were a small theater and the home office overlooked it. Not a huge deal since we just sent in written reports by mail for a few weeks until they got a new computer sent to us.

[-]

PuppyJakeKhakiCollar@reddit

My parents never even planned or prepared for regular everyday life, let alone a possible apocalypse.

We would all have died if we had to rely on them to get through a major global crisis.

[-]

giraffemoo@reddit

My mom stockpiled toilet paper and bottled water. When I asked why, she said "you'll be happy I did when everyone else runs out!". That still doesn't make any sense. I still have no idea what she thought would actually happen.

[-]

Reasonable-Wave8093@reddit

Diarrhea

[-]

Okra-Tomatoes@reddit

If she'd saved up she could've been ready for 2020.

[-]

mmoonbelly@reddit

I checked my laptop would work by forward clocking it to midnight 31 dec 99. No issue, but there wasten issue mid 2000.

I was in my final year at uni so was worried about losing my dissertation.

[-]

Lopsided_Bet_2578@reddit

I remember my new TV was “Y2K Ready!”

[-]

full_of_ghosts@reddit

I was in my first entry-level grown-up job, which happened to be in IT. I didn't have to work that night, but I was on call.

Nothing happened.

[-]

FlatSixFun@reddit

Nothing happened because of the Manhattan Project sized effort that went into fixing everything in the years leading up to it. I was in the trenches doing some of that work (though I was at the base of the Eiffel Tower for midnight).

[-]

clumsystarfish_@reddit

Exactly! This whole rewriting history because "nothing happened" negates the massive effort of so many people to actually prevent it.

[-]

schizo1914@reddit

We had a frat party called the "Alcohollenium"

[-]

Blue-flash@reddit

I was working in a hotel. We got drunk. I didn’t even consider an alternative.

[-]

clumsystarfish_@reddit

I was on Parliament Hill in Ottawa watching the snipers on the rooftops, after prepping 2 weeks of "just in case / emergency" food and supplies (I was involved in a federal youth volunteer program and prepping for Y2K was mandated).

[-]

Similar_Sale_5136@reddit

I was in the middle of the Everglades at a phish concert. Not sure what the family was doing. They sure didn’t prep.

[-]

pawogub@reddit

My family didn’t do shit.

[-]

seminarysmooth@reddit

My friend’s parents prepped with food and water in the basement. The mom was always in to fringe Christian religions so I wasn’t surprised.

My dad jokes that he had the task to walk around and place stickers on equipment that was y2k compliant, so all the printers/lab equipment/phones got stickers.

[-]

AstroNemisis@reddit

We didn’t but probably should have. Three days later my town got hit by a tornado and it would have been useful.

[-]

lady_forsythe@reddit

I backed up all of my fan fiction and creative writing on a Zip file and burned a bunch of music to CDs for my parents. That was all the prep we did.

And then stupid me ended up working in the tech industry in 2020 and was not prepared for the hot mess I had to deal with at work.

[-]

LAffaire-est-Ketchup@reddit

No, but I remember that on January 1, 2000, my live journal reset so all the dates were in 100 CE lol!!!

[-]

lizzibizzy@reddit

I was almost 20. My dad worked in IT for a major bank. I remember him being at the family computer preparing in case tech collapsed at midnight.

[-]

Character-Ganache187@reddit

I was in college, so we just partied all night and didn’t give a fuck. I worked part time as a bank teller at the time though, and the bank I worked at took it very seriously.

[-]

Neither-Mycologist77@reddit

My parents installed our own gas tank, filled the basement with canned goods and shelf-stable stuff, and got chickens and milk goats. (We already had the horses.) So... Yes.

[-]

MotoFuzzle@reddit

In a different way, I guess. My mom had ages and ages of overtime leading up to Y2K because she worked for a medical device company and they had to update all of their computer and database systems.

[-]

bikeonychus@reddit

No, my dad worked at the local council as a department head. Apparently when they patched the computers, they also did a presentation for the department heads to explain what the millennium bug was, and how the patch would prevent things going wrong.

I'm thinking back a long way now, but I remember him saying that in the UK, the government prioritised the emergency services and hospitals, and went from there, starting with the most at-risk governmental services.

[-]

Frequent_Alfalfa_347@reddit

I swear my parents are still eating their stock of canned foods from Y2K.

[-]

59apache01@reddit

Nope - we just said to hell with it and whatever happens happens.

[-]

noonesaidityet@reddit

My band was playing a show at a local dive, and we pleaded with the owner to cut the power at midnight. She did not think it was as funny as we did.

[-]

pyr8t@reddit

Along with usual items, my parents bought several hundred pounds of wheat. Stored In a couple 55 gallon drums. As of last year, it still grinds and makes bread just fine lol.

[-]

RootDDoot@reddit

My dad told me to not go out drinking, I told him I wanted to be numb when society ended

[-]

vinegarnglitter@reddit

My parents caught a flight to Sydney, Australia for practically nothing because they’d be in the air during the changeover. Alas, I had actual nothing as I was a student and couldn’t join them.

[-]

Specific-Library-312@reddit

An entire pallet of Golden Grahams. And pasta sauce. And noodles.

[-]

New_Needleworker_473@reddit

Nah. It was already fixed. I was at a bonfire with my friends doing things teens do on New Years. Lol!

[-]

GreedyComedian1377@reddit

They did nothing. Ill tell you what my dad did though. Called me at like 9 in the morning talking about "Holy shit did you see what just happened in Sydney!! They did the countdown and the video went out at midnight!" Fucking comedian

[-]

Gonna_do_this_again@reddit

My dad was an electrical engineer for GE and worked pretty much all through the 90s exclusively on making shit was good on their end at whatever projects.

[-]

Mme_Bissmou@reddit

I have been told that my mother-in-law purchased powdered milk and bottled water in anticipation of Y2K. My spouse likes to mention this from time to time.

[-]

absentlyric@reddit

Lmao! My dad had us fill the bathtub. I was like "wtf is this going to do?" Im honestly surprised other parents did this.

[-]

Ianthin1@reddit

My parents prepped by going on a cruise over new years. I had a party while they were gone.

[-]

lathamfalls@reddit

Nope I was the 20/21 year old daughter panic buying bottled water and hand sanitizer 😀

[-]

Atillion@reddit

I nervously waited to hear word from Australia crossing over okay before I put it completely to rest. I was a computer science major at the time so the classroom was all abuzz leading up to it l.

[-]

Primary-Strawberry-5@reddit

I spent a week hitchhiking between my sister’s apartment and my best friend’s places getting twisted out of my brain on pills and whiskey. New Years Eve I crashed at my aunt’s house and took a few dips in the punch bowl of sex on the beach. The next day’s hangover convinced me to quit partying for several years

[-]

Big_Tap3530@reddit

My friends and I saw Metallica play, we made sure to fill up on gas first. That was the extent of our planning ahead.

[-]

Danimal-8008@reddit

My parents went out to party and I got stuck babysitting my brother. I could not believe the audacity! You’re going to get fucked up as the world burns while your two children will have to fend for themselves?!?! I was/still am a worrier lol

[-]

jazzminarino@reddit

Similar. To OP's point, my father was also a retired FF but my parents left me alone to go party on vacation hours away for like three nights... I don't think we did any unusual prep outside I was banking on the computers not working, so I didn't do my massive project all Christmas break and had to complete the entire thing in a DAY.

[-]

E-Rock77@reddit

No idea how my parents prepped— probably bought extra food.

I figured there wasn’t much I’d be able to do about the end of the world. So I went to the Everglades to see Phish. If the world came to an end I’d just as soon be in the middle of nowhere having just witnessed the biggest/best concert in the world.

[-]

RedSolez@reddit

My parents are from NYC and my in laws (who I knew then too because I was dating my now husband) are from Philly. These are all highly skeptical people who didn't believe the hype and they were right.

[-]

jessek@reddit

We thought it was a non-issue. A neighbor panicked and bought a bunch of MREs and purified water, he already had a bunch of guns. Guy was completely computer illiterate, heard about it on talk radio and ordered some shitty self published book from a crank. I think he donated the MREs to a food bank eventually.

[-]