* Posts by Virtual Llama

2 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jul 2022

The 'nothing-happened' Y2K bug – how the IT industry worked overtime to save world's computers

Virtual Llama

I was the on-call for a global company during the year-end week in 1999/2000 and was tasked with checking each region as they passed midnight to see if there was anything they needed assistance with.

When I spoke to our guys in Moscow they told me 'Our Y2K bug has been fixed, our president has been replaced'.

In retrospect, I think that Boris Yeltsin's replacement has proven to be more problematic in the longer term than the millennium bug was!

We've got a photocopier and it can copy anything

Virtual Llama

After the fall of the Berlin Wall I was working for a well known copier company in a team doing IT work in Eastern Europe and Russia.

One colleague was once held for questioning by post-Soviet Russian (or perhaps it was Ukranian, it was a while back) border guards who had no concept of what a photocopier actually was but had twigged quite quickly that such a device could be used to copy currency and so somebody working for a manufacturer of such a device clearly shouldn't be travelling into their country!

It took a few phone conversations with the folks at the regional sales office to clear that one up and have him released.