On Call Y2K Welcome to a special festive season edition of On Call, in which we share readers' stories of working on the 31st of December 1999 – the moment the tech world held its breath and hoped years of Year 2000 bug remediation efforts would work.

Let's start with a reader we'll Regomize as "Graham" who at the time worked at a cable television network operated by a giant US telco.

Midnight passed without incident for Graham, but at 0010 an actual manifestation of the Y2K bug appeared.

"There was a problem with an old character generator that used an 80286 processor," Graham wrote. "The clock had stopped at midnight and the machine just froze."

Graham and his team spent months preparing for Y2K and sprang into action, then relaxed again when the borked box resumed operations after a simple reboot.

But then came a truly odd incident.

"One interesting and unanticipated problem was people shooting weapons," Graham told on Call. "In at least one case a merrymaker shot a distribution amplifier, knocking out cable for their neighbors. There was some discussion as to whether to include the outage on the Y2K dashboard or not."

The lights went out and I feared the worst

Now let's meet another reader we'll call "Kerry" who worked for a University that ordered all computers machines be turned off for Y2K eve.

Kerry's job saw him manage a fleet of Unix servers, and he decided to ignore that instruction.

"I was confident that nothing serious would go wrong and that my users could continue to work from home," he told On Call.

Kerry therefore went home and prepared for the millennium eve party he intended to host.

"At around 4pm everything electrical stopped working," he told The Register. "I felt the bottom drop out from under me. Were the doomsday predictions true?"

Spoiler alert: They weren't.

"I quickly found out the out that my neighbors did not have the same problem," Graham told On Call. "The main fuse of my house had blown because we were using way too much power."

And when he returned to work the following week, all was well – other than the banner page on print jobs dated "Monday January 3 1900."

• 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
• Vendor's secret 'fix' made critical app unusable during business hours
• Cabling survived dungeons and fish factories, until a lazy user took the network down

Worst … prank … ever

Now let's meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Rob" who at the time of Y2K worked for Sun Microsystems in the UK.

As a global company, Sun had an early warning system for any Y2K problems: Its Australian office was 11 hours ahead of the UK office, so if any problems struck there, the company would get advance notice.

Which is why, as midnight neared Down Under, Rob's boss called Sun's Sydney office … then heard the phone line go terrifyingly silent as the clock ticked pas midnight. Rob said that "scared the hell out of my manager" – at least for a few moments, because the phone soon rang.

"It was the Australian office, laughing their heads off," Rob told On Call. ®