Contractor Quaffed His Way Through Y2K Compliance While The Client Scowled
The Register, Friday, April 3rd, 2026
Easter means today is a holiday in much of the Reg-reading world, but that won't stop us from delivering another instalment of On Call - the reader contributed column that shares your tech support stories. To mark the occasion, The Register has revisited our mailbag of holiday-adjacent stories to tell the tale of a reader we'll Regomize as "Marcus," who told us he worked as a contractor for a "very large, very blue, blue-chip company" in the Netherlands and helped it prepare for Y2K.
"By special request, I was going to watch over my flock of Y2K changes on New Year's Eve," Marcus told On Call.
Marcus was confident he'd done the job right, so brought some beers to work.
"As I sat at my 3278 green screen terminal watching the logs for problems, I sipped my bottle of Grolsch," he told On Call, before admitting that bottle was "One of a few in my suspiciously large briefcase."
Y2K passed without notable incident.