The Bug That Paid My Rent
Every job I have had this year is the same job. Y2K. Two-digit date fields in systems that were never supposed to live this long and now think 00 comes before 99. So far I have gone through date logic in a school district’s student records, a manufacturer’s inventory system, and a clinic’s billing program. Different buildings, same bug, same deadline.
The work is not interesting to explain at dinner. It is inventories, searching code older than some of the people running it, test weekends, printouts. People keep asking if I think planes will fall out of the sky. No. I think some invoices will print wrong and some elevators will need a guy with a key. The boring stuff.
My prediction for January 1: nothing much happens, everybody says it was hype, and nobody remembers it was fixed by hand — by a lot of tired people checking boring things carefully. Fine. Invisible is what success looks like in this line of work.
The internet companies on TV, the ones with no profits? Maybe they figure it out — some of them are building real things. I will be over here with the rent money: the kind you earn making sure the world still works on January 1.