I have a personal email account that I signed up for clear back in 1997. Within that email account, I long ago created a folder that I named Savin’ Stuffin’, which has been a repository for email messages that I felt should be kept indefinitely. And I have NEVER gone into that folder to see any of these old messages. Tonight, I found myself wondering how old some of these messages might be. As it turns out, I have one message (a simple “Hi” from an old friend) from 1999. But it was the second oldest that grabbed my attention. It’s an OUTbound email, sent at 6:00 AM on January 1st, 2000.

At that time, I worked at a technical support call center, helping customers who had purchased my employer’s brand of “CD burner”. I won’t mention the brand name here, but I’ll give you a hint: it’s an anagram of PH.

Also at that time, the media were trying to whip the public into a frenzy by trying to convince us that all computers were going to cease functioning when the year changed from 1999 to 2000. For some reason, the management at Pewlett Hackard actually believed customers would be calling us around midnight (in each of their various time zones) with questions about our CD burners’ compatibility with “Y2K”. So, when I should have been out partying like it was 1999 (because it actually was 1999), I was sitting in a darkened call center, waiting for phone calls that never came. I passed some of the time that night by composing the outbound email mentioned above, which consisted entirely of the following set of Y2K haikus…

I’m chained to my phone.
They thought people would call me,
The bastards were wrong.

Y2K is here.
My computer is working,
Big fekkin’ surprise.

The world did not end.
This upsets me very much.
When will we all die?

Is it obvious
That I am insanely bored?
I would think it is.

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I haven’t been posting much lately, but that’s about to change. I am working on two product reviews, and will soon be reporting from the field, as I am leaving Tuesday morning for the oddly shaped state of Utah. What’s on the agenda for Utah? Looks like one amusement park, one scenic train ride, one giant pinball arcade, three national parks, one state park, and a couple things in Colorado on the way back.

Stay tuned, and as always: Don’t let the armwigs bite!