The Year 2000 (Y2K)

It was New Year's Eve of the year 2000 and we were all set to experience the greatest freakout of computer bugs in the history of glitches. It was the Milennium Bug. And it was said that the Internet wouldn't survive it. In fact, they said, even our clocks might not survive it. Our microwaves. Our cars. Anything that was guided by computer might come crashing to the ground, at dawn of the year 2000. They said this to a world who had maxed out their credit cards for every new electronic gadget that had come down the pike that decade. And now, they told us, it will all be a dud. And this, because of a lady who never foresaw the day we would need four digits to show the year. Maybe she did foresee it, but in 196?, it must have seemed eons away. And RAM was scarce. Techies and non-techies alike were running around like chickens with our heads cut off, squawking like Chicken Little: The sky is falling, the sky is falling. We won't survive the year 2000. My nieces were spending the night with us, and we were talking about the prospect of life without our newfound toy. (They jostled for elbow room at the computer. They didn't have one yet.) We played computer games and we watched the crowd in Times Square. We listened to predictions. I had my niece poised at the door, ready to run outside at my signal and blow the car horn. (That's what we do out in the boondocks.) Then the countdown started. Ack! At the stroke of midnight, the crowd went wild. I stood at the TV counting down for the ball to drop in Times Square. Outside, my niece did her duty and the horn was blaring. Far off, down in the pasture, fireworks boomed into the air. Our neighbors were celebrating, too.

On TV, all night, all they'd been speculating on was the stroke of midnight, and would every computer fail? After all my work, and on top of the news of the demise of my ArtForum, I was disgusted, as you might well imagine. But... I still had a sense of humor about it. At that moment, I conceived of a great practical joke that I would play on my nieces. No, I'm not the PJ I once was. I've mellowed ~ I have a reputation to maintain. Dignity. Integrity. But I still get a wild hare every now and then. I am a night owl, and the night was young. And I was giddy with champagne. I drank a whole cup. On TV, people were singing and dancing: 'It's the end of the world as we know it... and I feel fine! I feel fine!'

I felt fine! My computer was not smoking. But I was. I started hacking that keyboard. I was Stan with a plan. I was a Paintbrush whiz. I grabbed that Mouse and I painted that rectangle desktop green. Then I selected the color white, switched to text tool, and started typing gibberish. I chose Courier size 10 and I typed data. It didn't matter what data. I typed 000000s. I typed dates. I typed exes. I switched to Symbol and I typed Greek. I knew well what a trashed file looks like. I learned what a magnet does to a floppy disc back when floppies were 8 inches wide and, well ~ floppy. I covered that screen in Greek. In between the gibberish, I typed 2000, 1900, date does not compute. ERROR! ERROR! I typed all kinds of garbage. I switched to red, and changed the font size. I typed more garbage. Then I saved that file and made it into a Wallpaper. (Wallpaper was something I knew how to do. Early on, I'd had 6 months of a computer without Internet and with very little software loaded on it. I had time to learn how to do wallpaper.) Then I started on the folders.

By the year 2000, I had the knack of that drag-and-drop thing. I had Windows down pat. I created a single folder, and I named it dERRORf2000k. Then I dragged every folder on that desktop into that one folder. The one folder that couldn't be moved, I covered up. Shortcuts and Windows icons, I moved, covered with blank folders, or renamed to gibberish, having already learned that you can dump or rename shortcuts without affecting the file itself. I couldn't remove some of the Windows icons, but I could rename them. I renamed them gibberish. The one icon that wouldn't rename, I covered with the single folder I had created. That screen looked a mess! Those girls will freak when they see this screen, I thought. They will not know what to do. By then, I was dead tired, but happy, and I went to bed.

Come morning, I felt like dead meat. I am never much in the morning, and man, was I was sluggish that day! I was dying to see how the girls would react to to my little joke, but I didn't want to spill the beans, so I waited patiently. They never came up. I went downstairs and they were all involved in a movie. It was some long, drawn-out saga. It lasted for hours and hours. They never did come up. In the end, the joke was on me. My practical joke fell as flat as the Y2k Bug. I guess our great scare sounds pretty silly now. You just had to be there.

The Millenium Bug had scurried off to the cobwebs of tech history, and my site, Bugbones, was on the verge of a great new life. Said she.

Oh, the perils of Bugbones.

NOTE: This post was revised after I discovered I'd left out a segment. I've had to backtrack a little, in keeping with the timeline...
(Ref. chronology and y2k terms. I was there, but I just had to refresh my memory.


http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Year_2000_problem&oldid=258180096)

Algebra and Pizza

It's a sad thing to be geekless in a geek-driven world. I had so many questions. Technical forums were above my head. I learned not to post as a newbie (no need to be the butt of jokes). Sitting back and quietly waiting for the right answer to come up wasn't much help, either. Tech discussions, to me, always looked like those algebra problems Mr. Leonard used to put on the board. "If Train A is going X miles per hour on a zigzag railroad track and Train B is going Y miles per hour in the opposite direction, and the bridge is out at Point C... then who gets to order pizza?" (Mr. Leonard was a schizophrenic. I'm sure of it.) My brother wasn't much help. He thought I knew more about computers than he did. My niece, who seemed to be a whiz on computers, had a slight attention-deficit problem. She could hack away at the keyboard all right, but she rarely slowed down enough to find out what I actually wanted her to do. I wanted doublespacing in my text documents. "Here, look at all these cool fonts I downloaded for you," she would say.

"Uh, thanks," I'd say, "but I really liked Times New Roman better without those little cactus spines." There was another side effect to that particular brand of tech help. At the end, my machine would quite likely be reduced to a pile of rubble. Her professional philosophy pretty much fit in with all those Terms of Use documents you sign daily. "When it breaks, you're up the creek without a paddle and we're not liable. Oh yeah... and your machine will be reduced to a pile of rubble..."

Fat Shirley's Tech-Support Hotline... ?

Yes, humor had definite possibilities for a website. And I was already in humor mode. I was still an e-mail newbie. I was in joke-hog heaven! My mind was racing ahead to all the funny things I could write for Bugbones. And I could enlist my brother's help. He was in a funny band. They did skits, they had gigs. (It's what led to him being a woman in Fat Shirley's: A Trailer-Park Opera. That came later.) In fact he was also itching to do a site. He'd already started a small one. I helped. I helped him with opening an e-mail account and logging in and setting up a site. He helped me with which plug went in which socket, what the heck was a USB port, and did I have one? (I didn't) We were the amateur tech-support in our neck of the woods by now. All of our friends came to us. Professional tech support was available, but expensive. They had two answers to every question we asked: (a) we can plug in this disk and reinstall Windows; and (b) we can sell you this new PC ~ it has more megahertz. We did attempt to branch out and network among friends. To each of our questions, they had this response: 'I don't know nothing. All I know is WordPerfect.'

The Perils of Bugbones...

Easter Bunny Ears on John Wesley

By now my brain had switched gears and I was ready to do a humor site. Humor wasn't new to me. I had done my own cartoon strip for my high school paper. In college, I had had a high old time with humorous graphics and illustration, along with my true love, fine art. Not to mention, I'd done my fair share of gluing shoes to the floor, smearing Vaseline on doorknobs, hoisting underwear up the flagpole, and carrying of the roommate's bed out to put on top of the breezeway. Of painting the breaker-box covers with naughty little cartoons in the middle of the night. (It was artfully done.) Of putting Easter-bunny ears and a basket of eggs on the statue of John Wesley. (The dean of students just smiled ~ he was an old friend by then). It hit the morning papers. We had no idea someone had called them. The reporter was highly amused. The college president, much less so. I don't think he ever did get over it. Later he crankily accused us, the art students, of stealing a statue of a little boy with a thorn in his foot. We didn't. Or at least I didn't. That's real vandalism and theft. I don't go in for that. You know, that college president and our dean of students retired the year I graduated. I don't know why.

Bugbones, a fun site. Our new theme.

Oh, the perils of bugbones...