Comment by marcus_holmes
2 years ago
I thought this was going to be about Y2K, since it was written just after.
I worked for years in the late 90's on Y2K projects, helping to stop the UK's critical infrastructure from just stopping at midnight. Wales would not have water or gas without our efforts, for example.
But I've heard people since say things like "why did we spend all that money on Y2K, when it clearly wasn't a problem since nothing happened?" and even "Y2K was a hoax invented by the IT industry".
We won. We successfully stopped the Y2K bug, and it was hard work, and it wasn't obvious that we had caught it all by midnight. Yet rather than celebrating, some people saw it as evidence that we had been ripping them off. People are weird.
I know of several other issues like that. I myself made sure the highscore in a video game I was working on would work :-)
The thing that annoys me is that this is best case scenario when it comes to climate change. If we do in fact manage to avoid the apocalypse, all the "climate deniers" are going to feel vindicated.