Work stories: 2000

 Y2K (Year 2000) [Previous ¦ Intro]

Few periods in computing history saw so much effort put into and so little learned from, than the months running up to the year 2000. It started as a fair enough concern that old computer code, written decades ago to save space and thus entering dates as two (98) rather than four digits (1998), would not know how to interpret the year when it turned to 00, as 2000 or 1900? Snake-oil peddlers and honest managers alike got caught up in a maelstrom that went over the new millennium without even a pop, except for the noise created by the self-styled fear of Y2K.

Needless to say my employer got caught up in the act, as I was involved in data management projects where dates were not insignificant. That gave me an opportunity to move from Houston to London, and have our baby daughter get closer to grandparents in England and France! So I end up at BP in Sunbury, its old research center dating back to World War I, and now a hub of global data management from Azerbaijan through Brazil and Vietnam to Sakhalin. We had three months to rationalise their software, reduce its numbers to manageable levels as management changed its tune: it turned silos of exploration, production, finance and research (each with their jealously-guarded turf), into asset teams responsible for oil provinces from cradle to grave (which meant integrating all business processes); this is not unlike switching car production from assembly-lines at Ford for Model Ts, to teams responsible for each individual car at Volvo over half a century later.

On the shop floor where data is acquired, managed and handed to the geologists, engineers and accountants, Landmark and GeoQuest shared the turf - one managed data and the other the applications that turned data into information. Lots of toing-and-froing ensued with a year-end deadline looming, because one could never tell what might happen with those chopped-off dates! Both companies were pitched against each other in sales and marketing, as part of the two largest oilfield service firms, Halliburton born in Oklahoma and Schlumberger near Paris at about the time Model T Fords were built (my top entry illustrates an oilfield scenario repeated ever since)... Meanwhile back at the ranch (or the cottage) we simply had a job to get done in less than three months... So I helped forge a love-hate relationship with my 'competitors', who in time turned into camaraderie and cooperation for the common good of they who paid our bills (I had cut my teeth at Mobil in Dallas on a similar project almost five years earlier, with the deadline looming... that of the future ExxonMobil merger!). That effort bore fruit in my latest job, when both companies called on me to help them build GIS front-ends for their enterprise database offerings (rumor had it in fact that I joined ESRI, just so I could work above-board with both!).

Indicative of the fallacy of Y2K is that while the project came in on time and budget, a few items impossible to finish by year-end (as agreed to by all) quietly trickled on past the new millennium with neither (wo)man nor machine missing a beat...

2016 Update: This site was retired in 2006 upon our return from California to England, as was now my next gen. website www.zolnai.ca.