What were you doing 10 years ago?

It is coming towards the end of December 2009. What were you doing 10 years ago today? If you were at school or college I don’t want to know, it just depresses me. You might have been doing last-minute Christmas things, you could have been traveling to see friends , loved ones or maybe {and often less pleasurably} relatives. If, however, you were working in IT I probably know what you were doing:

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You were somehow involved in preparing for “The Y2K bug!!!” (Cue dramatic drum roll, ominous music, thunder-and-lightening video and the quiet shrill laughter of consultancy firms running all the way to the bank).

Remember that? I’m a little surprised not to have seen anything much in the media yet celebrating it, {I’ve not seen it in the UK anyway}, which is odd as it was such a very big deal back then. You remember? All the nuclear power plants were going to blow up, air control systems go haywire, bank systems crash and generally the whole of modern civilisation was going to crumble.

It did not of course. It’s biggest impacts seemed to be firstly to give old Cobol and Fortran programmers a bit of a financial boost to help them bolster the pension fund and secondly so much time, effort and planning was spent on Y2K preparation that 75% of other IT programs were shut down to cope. There certainly seemed a little less work to be had in the immediate aftermath.

I never decided who was more to blame for the hype and the fear. The Media, who can never pass a chance to boost revenue by outrageous scare tactics, or business/it consultancies who can never pass a chance to boost revenue by… I better stop there, in case I ever decide to go back to working for a consultancy.

I personally learnt a couple of things.

One was to prepare. In my particular case, I had planned a big Y2K party with a bunch of friends, hired a big house to hold a dozen of us plus kids and found somewhere to buy big fireworks from. All in 1998. And for 18 months before the event told anyone I went to work for that I would not be available for that particular week. I put it into my contract. Of the two or three companies I picked up contracts with during that period, none of them batted an eyelid when I mentioned this. Of course, this meant nothing. With 3 months to go before Y2K, the missive came rolling out from top management that no one, absolutely no one in IT was being allowed to take New years eve off.
I said to my boss “except me”. No, no exceptions. “It’s in my contract, I stated when I joined I was not available that week”. No exceptions. “Bye then”. Huh? “Well, I said at the time and I am sorry to upset you, but you see, this is a job, we had an agreement and what I have organised is my life and well, you lose”. I was a little more diplomatic about it, but I insisted. After all, we had fully Y2K tested the app I was responsible for and I had an agreement.
I had the week off (with a mobile phone by my side, admittedly, but I was not in a fit state to do much by the time midnight came around). I learnt that if you have an agreement and you calmly refuse to capitulate, and you negotiate a little, you can avoid “no exceptions”. {My friend Nasty Mike took the more direct approach of swearing loud defiance. He won also, but maybe with more bad feeling…}

The other thing I learnt was that companies will not pay less than they expect for a job. The five of us had written this app and it used four digit year dates all the way through the system. It was on Oracle 8. It worked. But no, Top Management wanted the system Y2K proving. So they asked a company to test it. This company wanted something like £50,000 to test it and it was to come out of our development budget. Ouch. That was pretty much half the budget.
So one of the team put forward a proposal to Y2K test the system via their company, for about £5,000.This was refused; it was too cheap to be believed.
So we put exactly the same proposal forward through another of our companies for £15,000 plus expenses and an exorbitantly hourly rate if extra work was needed.
This proposal was accepted.
So we did the work, we ran all the tests we specified, rolled the system past Y2K, repeated the tests, then…did a full refresh of the O/S, oracle and the app and recovered a full backup from before the initial tests. We were delayed by 24 hours as central IT screwed up the full oracle restore, so we got to charge the exorbitant hourly rate.
We handed the test results pack to the central IT team and their one question was “Why had we refreshed the O/S and re-installed Oracle? Well, we said, how do you know that going past Y2K had not set some internal variables within the O/S or the database that just setting back the system clock would not fix? The O/S is a complex thing.
The head of central IT looked ever so worried. No one had mentioned that before. And they had spent a lot on external Y2K testing consultancy…

Isn’t business odd at times?