ON CALL Y2K Welcome to another edition of On Call, The Register’s Friday column that shares your tech support stories. Over the holiday season we’re telling tales of the Y2K bug, and readers who spent December 31, 1999 on call in case the world’s computers caused calamities.

A reader we’ll Regomize as “Barb” who showed up for Y2K duty carrying a bottle of champagne, which rather upset her boss who had laid in sparkling grape juice to keep the on call crew sober.

Barb was having none of it and fair enough, because she married just 12 days before Y2K eve and postponed her honeymoon to work that night.

“This event comes once a century and this special one, once in a millennium, so I’m having a real toast,” she told the boss, and then made a concession by promising to share the bubbles with the entire team, in very small doses that would not impact anybody’s work.

Midnight passed, nothing broke, and the team began to relax. And then the phone rang, panicking the team.

“It was a client calling to see if any other customers had called to report a problem. They got a ‘Don’t scare us like that!’”

Barb’s life got busy after Y2K, and she eventually forgot about missing her honeymoon, before finally taking it 17 years later with a trip to Hawaii.

Other readers also told us Y2K meant they missed out on the party of the millennium.

“Alistair” told us his company made it through Y2K unscathed, and that he made it home at 3am to find his house empty because his wife was still out partying.

“I had one can of beer and a whisky chaser, to ‘see in’ the new Millenium, and went to bed. It was the most tame and uneventful New Years Eve I had ever spent.”

“Mark” told us he spent Y2K eve in New Zealand, and was supposed to inform his boss in Australia – where the time was two hours in the past – of any problems. Mark called and found his boss on a boat, under the weather, and incapable of action!

• When the lights went out, and the shooting started, Y2K started to feel all too real
• IT team forced to camp in the office for days after Y2K bug found in boss's side project
• User found two reasons – both of them wrong – to dispute tech support's diagnosis
• User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

Many readers sent us stories of employers putting on decent Y2K office parties or paying them very well for the night’s work.

A reader we’ll call “Mitch” said his workplace asked him to work on New Year’s Day, just in case things went south long after midnight, then turned a blind eye when he pinched a projector from the marketing department and used it to show a football match.

That seemed like a decent deal because Mitch’s employer had promised he could take the holiday at another time.

But then the company made a round of layoffs, and Mitch was let go before he could take the day he was owed.

“Bastards!” he told The Register.

Meanwhile, in the animal testing lab

Another reader, who we shall Regomize as “Gary”, also told us the night of Y2K passed without incident at the pharmaceutical company he worked for at the time.

“Other than joining some periodic conference calls and doing a walk around every so often checking in with the teams I had nothing to do,” he wrote. “I spent most of the day with my feet up reading a novel with coffee and biscuits.”

He told us preparing for his role as Y2K incident manager was far more interesting than the event itself.

“I had to join the overall site Y2K team planning for all departments across multiple major buildings, including the animal experimentation block,” he said, then added the following rather scary observation: “You don't want to hear the plans that were in place there in the event of a total power failure across the region as a consequence of Y2K!”

You’re right, we probably don’t!

But it is worth listening to Gary’s summary of the Y2K preparation push.

“Like many IT professionals, I had to bite my tongue for many months in social interactions with people who were not aware of this sort of effort and how it had paid off by sorting out as much as possible before the big day,” he wrote, and complained that people would often ask "What was all the fuss about Y2K?” and then judge it a waste of time and money.

On Call exists to celebrate the hard work IT pros perform at all hours of the day and night, often without reward or appropriate acknowledgement. We can’t tell these stories without your generosity, so if you have a tech support tale to tell, click here to send On Call an email. We hope to tell your story later in 2026! ®