December 31, 1999, my wife and I had dinner with my Granny and my dad. We were all together at 6:00 PM, and in winter, when it’s 6:00 PM in Nashville, it’s midnight in London, so we watched the year 2000 begin there, via CNN, as fireworks lit up Big Ben and Parliament. Later that night, I was back at home, and my wife was next door, which was her parents’ house at the time. I filled my bathtub with water and, on my Windows 95 computer, I played FreeCell game no. 32,000; there were a total of 32,000 FreeCell games available, and I played daily, but had yet to play what I assumed to be the ne plus ultra game, and reckoned I’d better, for much the same reason I had filled my bathtub with water. The reason was that I and most of the world at the time were concerned about “The Y2K Bug”, wherein our computers–mine, the ones running the water company, et cetera–would, at that fateful stroke of midnight, not realize that it was now the year 2000, but rather 1900, and…um…dystopian collapse or something.
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