.KEYWORD posty2k
.FLYINGHEAD FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
.TITLE Welcome to the new millennium
.DEPT
.SUMMARY Somehow, our intrepid leader managed to get Bill Clinton, Milli Vanilli, Karen Carpenter, cigars, loincloths, IBM, Eudora, pointy-eared Vulcans, flush-toilets, and Charlemagne all into one reasonably lucid editorial. What can we say? Read it and see if he somehow succeeds in pulling it off.
.AUTHOR David Gewirtz
If you’re reading this, I guess we made it.
Of course, that might not be true. If you’re reading the one printed copy that I affixed to the wall of my cave, then society probably tanked. Go back to gathering wood! And you, I asked for flint and steel. The side body panel of a Saturn automobile is plastic. Old VHS copies of "In Like Flint" swiped from the rubble of a Blockbuster don’t count. You can’t start fires with either of those.
For the rest of this article, I’m assuming we made it. If we didn’t, well, you shouldn’t be reading this anyway. You should be learning how to make deerskin loincloths.
Aside: it’s always a challenge writing these things before the fact. I’m writing this Christmas week of 1999, but it’ll be read right after Y2K on January 1st. You could almost think of this as an ancient and sacred text. After all, it was written in an earlier millennium.
So, we made it! I figured we would. I’m sure some things will fail (or is that "have failed?") We discovered that Eudora’s Change Queuing function got confused about the date change. Messages sent in December 1999 and queued up for delivery in 2000 wound up arriving right away. Oops. But we’ll live.
I’m sure there’ll be some other gotchas, too. The government’s on high terrorist alert. I really hope no one does anything stupid and, as you’re reading this, I’m hoping everyone’s OK. I think going to Times Square’s nuts, but I’m hoping it was just nuts, not horrible.
[Just a quick note after the fact. Boy was Y2K boring. Nothing interesting happened (which, I suppose is a good thing). But sheesh, talk about boring! – DG]
But enough of the doom and gloom. We’re at the dawn of a new millennium. Seriously. Pretty cool, huh?
Many of us know the concept of "imprint events" — those events during which each and every one of us knows right where we were at the moment the event occurred. Older folks know exactly where they were when JFK was assassinated. Younger folks may remember the Challenger disaster (I was in my car on Route 1 in the San Francisco Bay Area). You know where you were.
But January 1, 2000, is one of those points in time about which we’ve all wondered, "Where will I be?" That was certainly the case for me. I remember it vividly. I must’ve been eight or nine years old (I was born in 1961 — hey, my parents and many others didn’t even know if we’d survive The Cuban Missile Crisis. No one could have predicted The Presidential Cigar Crisis).
I remember being in my bedroom. The walls were an IBM Blue shade of blue. This was during my astronaut phase, so the walls were also covered with posters of space ships, flight paths, blueprints, and all the cool stuff of the Space Race era. I was thinking about the future and what it would be like. Would there be flying cars? Would we live on the moon? How old would I be? I was shocked when I realized I’d be ancient. My God, I’d be 38!
A lot’s gone on since the time I was that pre-pubescent young man. I’ve grown tremendously both physically (yep, diet time again, but this time I’m working out) and emotionally. I’ve been weathered and seasoned. I’ve pretty much grown up.
The thing is, as a grown up, my life’s a much different picture than I expected, which makes sense. I didn’t know what to expect then. I certainly didn’t expect the changes in family structures that have swept through our culture (and I wouldn’t have understood them as an eight year old, anyway). I didn’t expect to run a company. I didn’t expect the incredibly cool wonder that’s the Internet.
I think I expected there to be cool toys (and I’m so glad, as an adult, that that one turned out right). I don’t have a flying car (well, except for that one night in my twenties when I reached almost 100 mph
