Y2K

It was the witching hour, the time of night when only police and thieves watched out for each other in the shadows of the silent inky darkness. When most innocent souls are asleep, dreaming their dreams, the wishes and desires of their subconscious. There was Joe under the endlessly humming overhead office lighting, which ironically had become his companion to the lonely nighttime vigil. Head bent slaving over the keyboard trying to squeeze the last of his creative juices onto a blank screen page to complete the report.

The report needed to be ready for the printers and binding the next day. His last day before he moved out of Houston. He didn’t have time to say his farewells. He had already been whipped into the chaotic cyclone of his new life and would remain a prisoner there for another two years. He couldn’t even blame anyone but himself for his current plight. His body didn’t know sleep existed anymore, jetting into his temporary home for the last year, from the other side of the world, he was feeling more comfortable like those policemen and burglars, as the quiet dark shadow of the night became his safe haven. Not surprisingly the daytime bright lights and encroaching sounds of movement had become a challenge, as his lycanthrope existence and lack of sleep started to cause puncture marks to his concentration levels. Hallucinations were slowly creeping into his consciousness. He must keep focused and finish the report. He thought to himself; sleep will come later.

The deadline was a huge report, and a summary presentation. It was the first of many, and the start of a new way of life at Kloten airport, Switzerland.

The well used saying – “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”; always comes to Joe’s mind when he thinks about Switzerland. Those Swiss memories of faraway days are fading fast. Reflecting on days of future past, he felt like a minnow swimming around in a shark tank. Always available as a morsel of food, every moment was jeopardous; he was easy prey, a scapegoat, a tidbit for other people’s gratification, offsetting their hunger and frustrations that were none of Joe’s making. It was caused by years of self-denial, and self-neglect, with an unacceptable remedy well past the application date. Nonetheless, it was just a matter of time before he was gobbled up by the system and eaten whole, sometimes to be spat out distastefully. Or consumed, squeezed and confined in new corporate cultures with their tedious governance, or lost in translation to the nuances of numerous differing nationalities.

It was the reason these organizations had got themselves in a mess in the first place. A right pickle heading towards the impending deadline of Y2K, now looming over the horizon and facing complete closure of business, was a smack in the face. Logic and common sense had been taken hostage for years by broken promises and missed deadlines. These overpaid commentators, experts, analysts and ineffective corporate titles and processes had hemorrhaged money, and sucked the vital winds, the air of good commerce from the healthy flushed sails of these iconic companies in the airline industry.

The one-paced risk avoidance working practice of the Swiss. The charming courteous but indecisive Austrian’s, that can never decide on a solution that is good for some, it must be good for all. But it is never found, and a fool’s errand. The Flemish and the French, with their dual personalities. Easy going one minute or until they feel neglected, then they turn into that archetypical woman scorned. Wrap all this into an unlikely alliance created by a last gasp of breath of investment; lifelines enabling these drunk, obese, bloated national institutions to avoid the inevitable consequences of bankruptcy and the subsequent unemployment problems for many.

Half of Europe meets US working culture head-on, with a hugely significant deadline. It didn’t start well, or end well, and nothing was ever easy in between.

If he knew what was in front of him for the next few years, he would have taken up the profession of larceny. Setting himself up as a failed bank robber would have been an easy alternative to the impossible deadlines of Zurich. A couple of years in prison; he would take that trade any day of the week. A short period of incarceration with his feet up and catching up on some reading seemed a better alternative. The reality was a sweatshop located in Switzerland, working day and night, long after the cleaners had made their rounds. The location was named the goldfish bowl on account of the ceiling having a large carved-out space like glass bubble roof for light. This was the nickname of the huge office, with a cast of thousands, the stage of the great epic drama. With Joe in the constant spotlight as the project leader, the messiah for the doubters, and not just daily deadlines, hourly deadlines leading up to the dreaded clock change of the previous millennium, Y2K!

The anxiety and concern seem so unnecessary now looking back, time makes drama and major events pale into insignificance, but at the time it was equal in dramatic terms, as the recent global pandemic. For those that live through these worrying times, those distinct concerns fade with time and perspective. One is left with phrases like; “What was all the fuss about!” and the classic of classics, a full stop to end all debates “Put it all down to experience!”

The project was christened with the name Odysseus after the eponymous hero of Homer’s book of tales named Odyssey. Absolutely, the naming was a bad omen as Odysseus and the Odyssey was a long torturous epic struggle, many wars, many years, and many people died or maimed for life. The name should have been discreetly put back in the hat and banned from any possibilities of reselection.

So why did Joe volunteer for this project? Why did our poor reluctant hero put his proverbial neck in the noose, and step forward when every other sane person stepped back from the precipitous edge. With every approaching deadline about time itself, concerns rose with the world’s digital clocks being recalibrated with an additional digit, and most people hoped the logic of code would not be a huge hiccup and ruin an end of a millennium party.

Those days in Switzerland were chaos, utter chaos.

Where old European working practices and cultures clashed head on with American. Joe felt overwhelmed, ill equipped, and overboard in a mighty ocean of stress, certainly without a life jacket of support from his small private US company. Without even a piece of driftwood, daily at peril working with those huge bloated national institutions for two frantic years. There was no solace that he volunteered for the assignment, volunteered for the most honourable reasons. To be closer to his wife, and young child. Separated by the need to provide income.

So, he was given a rent-free apartment in Embrach, but that didn’t balance the uphill struggle, the battle to meet deadlines. Numerous deadlines which carried the dreaded Y2K switch, that no one in the world of binary code could ponder without dread.

Even before he took the flight to Switzerland there were frantic days before departure closing down his life in Houston, transferring ownership of the rented apartment, selling the car, and pouring over the project debrief. It meant hours working in the Houston office, and then printing, and bounding of hundreds of copies for the “kick-off” session in Zurich. The preparation time for his new assignment had been shortened, by a promise made to another project team in Vietnam. After spending months in Hanoi, the conditions of accepting the new project in Zurich were to complete the current assignment in the land of Tet. He was a man of his word, which was more than could be said for the US company. He had promised his coworkers, the Vietnamese airline, that he would get the project up and running. That project was simple in comparison to the complexities of the next two years in Switzerland.

The Houston based company was owned by a husband-and-wife team who had been successful during the 1980’s and 1990’s beyond their dreams. However, the winds of fortune changed to frosty starting with events in Switzerland and based on their commitment to the iconic Swiss giant company they had met their Armageddon. By signing the contract and commitment, the small growing company in the US had overstretched itself. The salesperson was held up as the champion, but as every salesperson knows once the contract has been signed, he can rest and enjoy the fruits of their commission. It is left to others to deliver and be accountable in the delivery process. These are the unsung heroes in a high-tech company, when many so-called products are in reality vapourware. The monetary value of this contract was huge for the small company, but there were so many hidden as well as visible penalties based on deadlines. The small company was like David taking on many iconic Goliaths. It was fraught with failure and liabilities. Success could only be achieved if the small company was fully focused and dedicated and wasn’t greedy with most of the payment received up front. It could be accomplished. Unfortunately, the small company was greedy, and neither saved the huge amount of money released on the front end of the contract, for a rainy day, nor allowed the income as an investment to gain more resources. Instead, they thought the good days would continue like the upward spiraling revenue curve. The early warning signs were already appearing of a catastrophic global economic failure; soon to take place after Y2K.

This unrealistic expectation of continued double digit annual growth within the small organization eventually lost the husband-and-wife, the ownership of their company, their baby. A more pragmatic approach would have avoided the bloodletting that was to come later.

Jumping on the flight to Zurich with his bosses and still drafting the presentation on the overnight flight was a sequel to the chaos and frenzy of the next few years. The days of the gung-ho approach, and just getting by, would now meet the scrutiny and inspection of the bigger and more experienced company in Switzerland. It would only end in sweat and mental tears. There was some secret cost saving advice from onlooking sympathizers. In the end, huge penalties and hidden costs were avoided in the final reckoning. The toil and many hours of strife of a few brave souls under extreme pressure didn’t end in a complete financial disaster. It could have been a lot worse.

All that was far into the future, as the smiling optimistic team from Houston bundled off the aircraft in Zurich. A quick freshening up at the airport hotel, their arrival was met with friendly smiles in the large meeting room, eagerly attended with more than one hundred people assembled from all over Europe. Waiting with anticipation for his presentation – a solution to all the giant iconic airline’s problems.

Joe had conceived a clever title, “Houston. We have a problem!”, trying to convey a subtext that the small company was there to solve the larger companies’ dilemmas. For years the larger companies had attempted to develop a solution to handle the airline’s network passenger traffic from a future demand and pricing prospective. They were so confident of success, that they embedded the Y2K switch into the coding. In 1997, they admitted after spending millions on the project, it was doomed to fail. The answer was to outsource the work to a relatively smaller software company to do the work. Let the smaller company take the risk of failure with huge financial liabilities, and at less cost, than the bigger company. Most software companies wouldn’t touch the project proposal with a barge pole, but the small up and coming company in Houston was ambitious, greedy, and the contract was signed.

Joe didn’t know the background details at the time of the presentation. He possessed all the naïve confidence of an innocent bystander before a hit and run accident. He had volunteered with good intentions, but he surely had been set up for failure. All his bosses smiled confidently as he worked his way through the presentation that day, showing their support. It was fake and a complete sham. With the report and presentation completed, the honeymoon was over. With the congratulatory slapping each other on the back over, the end for them was in sight. Soon afterwards his bosses would disappear as they boarded their return flight to Houston. Switzerland would soon become a long distance away and would soon disappear from their minds and attention. Their priority was onto the next sale and contract.

He finished the presentation, sighed with relief, and then conducted the question-and-answer session. He should have been warned, as the multilingual audience hadn’t necessarily absorbed all the content, lost in translation, based on language, on culture differences, and working practices would be a constant issue, and so it started as early as the Q&A session that day.

A French speaking lady questioned what most of the English-speaking audience understood as she asked. “Weez e boot de chicken?”

Joe was well prepared, but still, he did not understand a word.

He looked around and sought some help from the audience to comprehend the question. No help was forthcoming; no translation could be gained. Everybody was as equally puzzled as he was. He thought to himself, chickens? Y2K and his company weren’t in the business of delivering poultry solutions.

She repeated. “Weez e boot de chicken?”

Again, the audience did not give him any clues. Then someone whispered, "check-in", she is asking about the "check-in!”

Confusion reigned from day one, this trend continued unabated; with frenzy and stress for the next two years.