OK, admit it...did anyone one here get caught up in the Y2K hysteria?

For those of you not old enough to remember, back in the early to mid 90s, corporate America spent countless man hours hiring people to fix their computer systems so they would be ready for the year 2000. The problem being that computers were by and large set with 2 digit year fields, the computer assuming it was 19xx, so when the year changed to 2000, most of the computers in use had to be changed so that they would know that the year 00 was 2000 and not 1900. And that was one part of it, but to the masses it was something more sinister.

A fair number of otherwise reasonable people were convinced that there were some computers which controlled everything from global communications, to nuclear weapons, to the power grid, to our water treatment facilities…you name it, that had components which somehow were under the ocean or something and we weren’t going to be able to get to them, so when the calendar rolled over, the entire world was going to go dark, nuclear missiles were going to launch, it would essentially be armageddon. People were buying up gas masks, bottled water, canned goods around December of ‘99, they were digging up old bomb shelters that had been built in the 50s and never used, they were positively losing their minds.

Now the vast majority seemed to be like me, who thought (rightly) the whole thing was paranoid nonsense, and who didn’t stock up on toilet paper and cat food, but clearly the grocery shelves were running out of a LOT of things in December of 1999, so I know it wasn’t just a small handful of people who bought into it. So fess up…were you one of the doomsday prophets?

If so, tell me about your experience. Tell me what convinced you that this was possibly something to be worried about…and how far did your paranoia go? Were you warning everyone, or were you maybe quietly stockpiling bottled water just in case, since hey…you’d drink it anyway, it would just take longer to do so? I’m not going to make fun of you, I’d just like to hear some peoples’ stories.