Did you ever party like it’s 1999? Have you ever experienced any moments that make you sit back and say, “Sure glad they didn’t have smart phones back then?” Those adventures that are indelibly pinned into your memory. Those escapades that make you question whether you ever had a trace of common sense.
I remember when December 31, 1999 was quickly approaching. Though I was still in my twenties, I had already entered into the time-relativity paradox where each Christmas and each birthday raced by so fast as to be one continuous blur.
[ASIDE]: Go back in time to when you were six years old. You knew that for your seventh birthday, you deserved a new bike. Only three hundred sixty-four more days to go. Wake up and eat breakfast. Brush your teeth and go to school. Sit through class. Ride the bus home. Play outside with your friends in the neighborhood. Do your chores. Eat dinner. Do your homework. Brush your teeth. Go to bed. Only three hundred sixty-three more days to go. When will it ever come? By the time we hit middle age (and our kids say things like when I get as old as you…), we are screaming STOP!!! No more birthdays! [ASIDE COMPLETE]
The Y2K bug terrified most people. This was less than two decades ago, and we were not as wired as we are now. We didn’t bank on our phones. We didn’t store our music and pictures in some mythical, far-off magic land called The Cloud. But most things ran on computer. It just hadn’t inundated so much of our daily lives. Today, your fridge can order your milk that you can pick up from the store without ever getting out of your car wherein you sat and started the DVR recording your favorite show and heating the oven so you can pop in the large gourmet pizza you added to the shopping list.
People were in a panic back then. Nothing was going to work when we woke up on January 1, 2000. We were going to be thrown back into the stone age with mastodons as dishwashers and giant BBQ ribs you could put on the side of your foot-powered car for dinner. It was going to be chaos and anarchy.
Secretly, I was looking forward to it. Simpler times. Simpler responsibilities. If I woke up on the first day of 2000 and the Y2K bug had devoured our electronic lives, I think I would have grabbed a lemonade and just sat on the porch to watch it happen.
A friend of mine had rented a couple cabins at a resort close to Eureka Springs. We partied like it was 1999. Except for Chrissi—we learned that very day she was pregnant with our son. Sure are glad no one had cameras on their phones. But there were regular cameras. Floating around in a garage or attic somewhere is a picture of a sun-starved butt running up the street with nothing but a pair of tennis shoes. I will not say whose it was.
When we turned in, we had forgotten all about the Y2K bug. So I walked out of the bedroom, dragging my feet and rubbing at my eyes. Of course, I went straight to the television. I reached down and hit the power button.
Nothing.
No static. No sound. No picture. I shouted and scared everyone there. “YES! It happened.”
But the television in the cabin next to ours was working. Saturday morning cartoons. Crap. That meant I had to go to work on Monday. Y2K let me down.
But I partied like it was 1999.
