FAIL

Grab your survival kits and a whole lot of food and water, because everything's about to get very Dark Ages up in here. Y2K's coming, and all your money is about to disappear and your electronics are going to fail like an attempt to get Lindsay Lohan's life back on track.

...Wait, what's that you say? Nothing happened on Y2K? The world didn't end in a fiery, bankrupt cataclysm? How can this be?

Well, let's look at the nature of this world-dreaded apocalypse. The reason for everyone getting all up in arms was the fact that computer systems (which were used in everything from banks to planes to refrigerators) kept date records with only 2 digits to represent the year: for example, "93" instead of "1993". The problem with this was that when the calendar hit January 1st, 2000, the ascending year count would revert back to "00", as in 1900, not 2000. And no computers or electronic records existed in 1900. People were afraid that this would cause pretty much every machine in the world to fail and planes would crash, banks would lose all monetary records, nuclear plants would destabilize and melt down, and microwaves would be unable to zap up some popcorn to watch this sucker go down.

In order to prevent the end of the world, computer experts the world over frantically set to work updating computer systems to run on a 4-digit year count so that the world could safely enter the new millennium, and not relive the last 100 years on the fiery plains of Armageddon.

Then the (Doomsday) clock stuck midnight; the ball dropped in Times Square, and shockingly, tragically, there were no headsplosions. No planes fell right out of the sky, everyone carried on drunkenly, threw up, came to 16 hours later, and were perfectly able to go to the mall and splurge their still existing money on after-Christmas stuff (marked down 70%!).

In an ironic bitchslap from reality, all of the nerdy computer scientists' hard work was rendered pretty much meaningless, since nobody in the entire world had a problem worse than the hangover they would wake up to in the morning; countries that spent vast amounts of money scrambling to update their computers experienced the same (small) number of problems that did barely anything to prevent the end of the world (Italy, Germany, and South Korea, guys, get 'em!).

This information is brought to you by the Source of all Knowledge, Wikipedia. Cthulhu fhtagn!

So yes, for all the hype, for all the fear and panic, Y2K amounted to what experts refer to as an