Photo Credit : Mike Cohn

Some bad New Years I had:

1984: The first New Year my wife and I did not celebrate together (we married in 1975). I will have to give the details in a separate post.

1997: My wife and I took a New Year's Eve Cruise on the Red Boat to Bahamas. The ads looked so romantic: champagne and auld lang syne and fireworks in the middle of the ocean. We had taken the Red Boat a number of times before but only in the Summer. This was our first Winter cruise and the seas were roiling. My wife got deathly seasick and I didn't help matters by pitching back and forth whenever she stood in front of me. Dramamine didn't help since you have to take it BEFORE getting seasick. Now she wears a seasickness patch before we travel by ship, Winter or not.

2000: The Y2K hysteria was a real problem for my company. Although our software was ready for Y2K, we also relied on third party applications that were said to be ready for the year 2000, but we couldn't be sure. We tried to run mock simulations by setting the clock on a test server to a date past 11:59:59 PM 1999, but sometimes errors do not show up except in a real time setting. Since we bill telephone calls by start time and end time, if the dates inside some of the applications didn't work right a 2 minute call could look like negative 2.147 billion seconds long. I had a crew with me as midnight rolled around and sure enough, there were a ton of problems. It only took an hour to fix but nonetheless it was nerve racking when the first few applications failed. There were no widespread catastrophes in the world but I'm sure many businesses had mini crises that were solved before anyone woke up on January 1.