Not call 911 unless it was an emergency. Not withdraw a large amount of cash from the bank. Among other things. Many of us had to work New Year's Eve, clicking cups of fizzy grape juice with colleagues to toast 2000. And many of us would just as soon forget that memory and others associated with the global meltdown that wasn't.
Embarrassment is one reason.
Joey Salome of the Backwoods store in Old Town was selling camp stoves and dehydrated foods and water purifiers, wondering how many of the items would be returned after Jan. 1. Some people were probably embarrassed to bring them back and embarrassed to admit that's the reason they had bought it in the first place. Companies and governments spent billions of dollars getting computer systems ready to take the dramatic rollover in numbers from 1999 to 2000. One man who headed up a Y2K call center for businesses and manufacturers says that all the money people spent to prepare their computer systems for Y2K paid off. Y2K was a real problem.