A blast from the past. Y2K. The day all life as we knew it was going to end.
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No I did not and it was fine…
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I definately did not as I was working as a tech support adviser for dialup internet service until 1am that night ! (Got paid 5x usual pay for the whole shift so not so bad)
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December of 1999 I was on a ship bound for the Diego Garcia. The captain had us all brush up on navigating with sextants. He was so afraid that the GMDSS system would go down with Y2K. It was fun seeing the younger officers, who had never touched a sextant outside of school, sucking up to the officers who were just old enough to have spent time at sea using celestial navigation
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I remember those days. There was even worries that chemical and petroleum plants would have massive leaks because of computer malfunctions. They had many, many people nervous about a lot of things…
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ha ha I remember. So many people in my family concerned and calling me for advice. TO be honest I didn’t know what to expect. I was hoping things would be fine and proceed without minor interruptions. I was surprised at how easy things went. There were some desperate people predicting doom and gloom. I would not of minded if my credit score would have been destroyed 
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That sticker was bad advice indeed !
I was testing several systems of fixes, including expensive dongles with a real time clock in.
However if you were running a modern OS, the OS would be in charge of the time while running so override the BIOS.
Keeping your PC on during the change was the best thing to do, and cost nothing.
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Another thing that happened to us on Y2K. One of our crewmen passed away. Cape Town South Africa, is a pretty normal place to put off bodies for repatriation. Our ship was carrying a load of bombs for the US government. The authorities in Cape Town were afraid that if we came into port terrorist might target the ship. Y2K had stoked up a lot of crazies. We pulled up to the sea-buoy and lowered the crewman’s body down in a littler to a launch, before putting back out to sea.
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I’m glad I was never stationed at Diego Garcia. It’s 12 month tours now extended to 24 if requested but still, 12 months is a long time there.
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Unfortunately it was more likely to have been your bank account that would have been destroyed. In 1998 I was one of many teams of people on 3 continents working round the clock on fixing date fields that had no century throughout consumer banking systems that no one expected to have such a long life, resulting in a panic to find mainframe assembly language programmers. All the date fields were fixed and tested by the beginning of 1999, a year ahead of the crisis date. I get the impression from the failures I see in the press (including today in the UK) that less care is being taken now with banking software - or all the people who understood it have retired.
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I was a Merchant Mariner. My tours in BIOT were 120 days. When I took the ship out, there was about 30 days to get there and 90 days at anchor before flying home. The next year I flew out for 120 days. After that I went back on the northern European run, and had no more 100% military contracts. 146 days was the longest I was every assigned to one ship strait. I was classed as a GS-12 and the Master of my ship was classed as GS-15.
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but but but… a man can dream about erasing debit 
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I just left my GS-9 position to pursue my own business. I loved my time in the Navy but I got really sick of working as a civilian for the DoD. All the MM I worked with were classy folks with a ton of respect. MM and Coast Guard were my favorite people to work with.
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Thanks for your kind words. I was lucky to be a member of IOMM&P union. They provided a good buffer between the navy and my ship. Other ships in the lagoon had weaker unions and the navy ran them a merry dance. I will never forget how shocked the navy was when they learned that union ships are not “two pot.” They had to send us officers food for all our guys. The food was really good. All the chief stewards in the lagoon had a competition going to see which ship could send their folks ashore with the best picnic.
P.S. I was Coast Guard for a while too.
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Ahhhh, Y2K memories! I was a Med Tech in our hospital lab and part of the Y2K team. I came in at 9pm, drank a bunch of coffee, waiting for disasters and…nothing. I got overtime and shift differential so a nice paycheck. The doctors started calling the lab at 10:30 to make sure they could get results. We had printed up every patients lab results for however long their stay was and had runners assigned to get printed results up to the floors if needed…tons of preparation and none of it needed. Good times!
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