World will end on the 7th, then again on the 21st.

[Closed Womb]

I totally had all of my direct-ship Christmas gifts arrive on the 21st. That way the recipients won't have to deal with the USPS if it all ends. :mrgreen:

[NeonJungle]

That made me laugh out loud, Closed Womb.

[Arete]

So do I finish this friggin scarf I'm working on and start on the hats? Wrist strain isn't fun, you know.

[JesusFightClub]

I remember being a bit worried about the Y2K thing. And then, when Russia and China didn't have mass chaos, I figured it would be OK. So I put on my "make my butt look killer" pants, my boots and a low cut shirt and went out to celebrate the New Year.

Nice!

I put "Final Countdown" on repeat and then jumped in a river.

[JesusFightClub]

Er, ETA a small river - loads of people had done it and were splashing each other and having a laugh!

[moodygirl86]

I remember all that Millennium Bug bullshit and everyone panicking about how computers wouldn't recognise 2000, and would assume we had gone back to 1900. But 2000 literally IS 20 hundred, both as written and numerically speaking! And it was so-called experts who didn't seem to understand this! I really had to restrain myself from saying something smug when the 1st January 2000 rolled around and nothing had changed.

I think that guy in NY who thought the world would end in May 2011 had predicted the same thing would happen in 1991, and when it didn't, he claimed to have got his sums wrong. Methinks someone needs some emergency maths classes then! Oh, and why do people like him ask everyone for money in the run-up to one of these promised but never delivered apocalypses? I thought you didn't need money in heaven? Scam artists, the lot of 'em...

[Sumeri]

I remember all that Millennium Bug bullshit and everyone panicking about how computers wouldn't recognise 2000, and would assume we had gone back to 1900. But 2000 literally IS 20 hundred, both as written and numerically speaking! And it was so-called experts who didn't seem to understand this! I really had to restrain myself from saying something smug when the 1st January 2000 rolled around and nothing had changed.

I was living in a teeny town in North Dakota that year (less than a hundred people, and over a hundred miles away from any city of substance) and we joked that even if there was widespread panic and computer issues nothing would change for us - we didn't even have a cash register in the grocery store. :lol: And, as we thought, nothing at all changed for us.

[Black Aliss]

I'd like to know at what point during the day on the 7th or the 21st the world will explode? Will different timezones break off & fly into space? When its the 21st in Samoa it will still be the 20th in Hawaii.

Most of the Mayans are on Central Standard Time, so we can assume that's the timezone to be aware of. Except that the Mayan calendar doesn't really end, it just rolls over into a new cycle, as it has twice before. So while the preppers are readying their bunkers, the Mayans have been celebrating the countdown for a couple of months now.

[No Cure for Stupid]

Aw, darn it? Did I miss yet another apocalypse. I'm so disappointed. Well, there's still the twenty-first to look forward to.

[julie paradox]

I remember all that Millennium Bug bullshit and everyone panicking about how computers wouldn't recognise 2000, and would assume we had gone back to 1900. But 2000 literally IS 20 hundred, both as written and numerically speaking! And it was so-called experts who didn't seem to understand this! I really had to restrain myself from saying something smug when the 1st January 2000 rolled around and nothing had changed.

I think that guy in NY who thought the world would end in May 2011 had predicted the same thing would happen in 1991, and when it didn't, he claimed to have got his sums wrong. Methinks someone needs some emergency maths classes then! Oh, and why do people like him ask everyone for money in the run-up to one of these promised but never delivered apocalypses? I thought you didn't need money in heaven? Scam artists, the lot of 'em...

Moodygirl, the reason nothing happened was that thousands of experts had spent a very very very long time rewriting all the programs so that they would recognise the new date.

Yes, two thousand is twenty hundred, but the point was that the dates hadn't originally been entered as any kind of hundred at all. You probably aren't old enough to remember this, but there was a time when having an extra two digits in a date field was looked upon as a waste of valuable storage space (anyone remember why capitals come first in ASCII?). Since people writing the software assumed it would all be sorted out by the end of the century they didn't bother.

Then suddenly it was, oops, almost the end of the century and time to get it sorted out. THAT's why there was a panic.

[moodygirl86]

Moodygirl, the reason nothing happened was that thousands of experts had spent a very very very long time rewriting all the programs so that they would recognise the new date.

Yes, two thousand is twenty hundred, but the point was that the dates hadn't originally been entered as any kind of hundred at all. You probably aren't old enough to remember this, but there was a time when having an extra two digits in a date field was looked upon as a waste of valuable storage space (anyone remember why capitals come first in ASCII?). Since people writing the software assumed it would all be sorted out by the end of the century they didn't bother.

Then suddenly it was, oops, almost the end of the century and time to get it sorted out. THAT's why there was a panic.

Whoops, showing my youth! Thanks Julie, you learn something new every day on FJ.

[Trynn]

*nod* I do remember filling out forms and only having to put down 2 digits, especially in the "date of birth" field, where it was assumed that if you were old enough to be filling out the form, you had to have been born in the 1900s.

I remember the Y2K thing. I decided that God loved us too much to let something that bad happen. (I was a pretty naive child...)

From what I understand, by the time the Y2K "Crisis" had hit the news, the problem had already been solved. The media was just a WEE bit late on that one.

[kiwimusume]

With what a PITA it was to send gifts to my family overseas from my small-town post office, I will be PISSED if the world ends before they open them.

As for Y2K, my dad had a field day. My family live in the timezone that's furthest ahead, so when the clock struck midnight my dad leapt on IM and started spoilering all his friends in other countries.