It’s 18 months before Y2K, and this database admin pilot fish is settling in as a government contractor on an already troubled project to modernize an application.

And then someone upstairs realizes that, hey, it’s almost 2000. “Memo came in from the assistant secretary of the department,” says fish. “Essentially it said, ‘You need to make all your code Y2K compliant by March 1999. If not, you will be spending all your budget making your code Y2K compliant or we will take your budget away.’

“In a blink of an eye, a new half-million-dollar, Y2K-compliant computer was purchased, and the project turned into a make-the-old-COBOL-code-Y2K-compliant effort.

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