decade
Ah, New Year’s Eve 1999. You whippersnappers are too young to remember the Y2K bug but we thought it was a big deal. I worked in IT for a bank and we were all rostered on to work overnight and through the next day, just in case. The people who worked from 10pm to 6am got $6000 for their efforts. I only had to work from 6am to 2pm on January 1, so I just got $4500. I used it to put air conditioning in my old house. It was good.
(The guys who had to work overnight had it better as everything was laid on for them and they had a prime spot on the floor to watch all the fireworks. One of them told me that at about 5 minutes to midnight there was a power surge in the city and all the lights went out. “We thought, oh crap, we’re in for a long night.” Heh, heh, heh.)
Anyway, I was also on call just in case there was a problem, so I had to stay home (I don’t know why, we theoretically could log in from home but it was on shitty 56K dialup and anyway how would that work if everything had turned to shit?), so me and my then-husband Andrew stayed home, ordered pizza, and watched videos. Yeah, partying like it’s 1999 is really quite lame. At 10pm we turned over to watch midnight celebrations in Wellington, New Zealand. I always thought they really missed a great joke by not turning off all their lights on the stroke of 12. Seriously, how funny would that have been? The first major place to tick over and it all goes black. Hee!
So eventually it got to midnight and I poured a naughty half glass of wine (I wasn’t supposed to drink on call) and we went out into the backyard to watch the fireworks. I was overcome with emotion, and the booze (this was also before I discovered wine; now it takes a full glass to get me drunk). Here we were, the clocks were all ticking over to zeroes, it was a brand new start. I love new beginnings. I was going to be a better person from now on, nicer, kinder, everything good. I could just tell this was it.
“Happy new millennium, world,” I whispered to the night sky.
“Happy new millennium,” Andrew replied. “… Of course, it’s not really the new millennium yet…”
“Oh for fuck’s sake, will you JUST LET IT GO?” I snarled. And thus ended the shortest resolution attempt ever.
We split up a year and a half later, are you surprised?
*
And now here we are, ten years later. I’m back in the same city, married again, once again not doing anything for New Year’s Eve. And yet in the meantime I’ve been all around the world, fallen in debt, fallen in love, got out of debt, got married, got pregnant. I’ve travelled so far. It might look like I’m in the same sort of place I was that night, but really I’m a completely different person.
I wonder where I’ll be ten years from now?