Companies across the globe were making all kinds of preparations for a possible doomsday scenario. The company I worked for at the time—a seedy herbal remedies outfit with a CEO who was a paranoiac Tony Robbins wannabe—was no different in this regard. My company used a lot of technology and the last quarter of 1999 was hyper-focused on figuring out how to make sure the business wouldn’t come to a grinding halt once the New Year arrived. But I really had nothing to do with these frantic preparations because I was merely the marketing writer and my knowledge of technology at the time didn’t go further than “insert floppy disk here.”
So while all the IT guys were running around the office fretting about their DOS and their ROM and their BIOS and their RAM, I had lots of time to think about what the potential end of the world might mean for me on a personal level. I was a 30-year-old single man inhabiting a small one-bedroom apartment in Tempe, Arizona. I had a low-paying job, a beat up 1988 Oldsmobile, and way too much credit card debt. Things may have looked bleak, but I did have an ace in my back pocket. I had a girl. And that girl changed everything.
Her name was Nicole and I had met her in the Fall of 1998. She was smart, funny, beautiful, and she laughed at every lame joke I told. The only problem was, she was dating someone else and for the first nine months that I knew her we were in the dreaded “just friends” zone. This was a zone I was acutely familiar with, having been relegated to it by a variety of women for most of my adult (and teen, and pre-teen, and childhood) life. But this time something felt different. There was a connection between us that gave me some confidence that I would be able to break out of the “just friends” zone and find my way into another, wholly unfamiliar, but much more exciting zone that I didn’t even have a name for yet.
We hung out a lot. When she wasn’t with her boyfriend she was with me. We watched movies, browsed at record shops, and went out to eat. One day we met for lunch at an Einstein’s Bagels at noon and were kicked out by the workers at 6 PM when they closed. Neither one of us had any idea that six hours had passed as we sat there and talked. (Although I should have had a clue when I took one last bite of my bagel toward the end of our stay and the cream cheese tasted like a sailor’s foot.)
As our relationship strengthened, Nicole’s relationship with her boyfriend weakened. I was a perfect gentleman, though, and never overstepped my bounds. But when the two of them broke up in the early summer of 1999, I was the first person she called for comfort. We went out to eat and I did bad magic tricks to cheer her up. I remained the perfect gentleman, though, and had no intention of taking advantage of her in a vulnerable situation. But apparently she had other ideas and not long after her breakup we were a couple. I had finally left the “just friends” zone behind.
Although we just started dating in July, we were building on a nine-month relationship, so we had already had tons of the getting to know you conversations. Of course, we were still getting to know each other, but we had a tremendous head start on most new couples. And that’s why, just a few months later, as everyone was making their Y2K doomsday preparations, my thoughts didn’t turn to the end of the world, but the beginning of a new life, with Nicole by my side. I decided I would propose to my girl, and what better time to do it than New Year’s Eve 1999?
I became even more frantic with preparations than the IT guys trying to stave off techno-chaos. I intended everything to be a complete surprise, so my preparations were done in secret. I bought a ring, made reservations at a fancy restaurant, and rented a Jaguar so we could drive around in style. Days after I placed the reservation for the car, Nicole and I were driving around in my Oldsmobile when a Jaguar drove past. I asked her what she thought of that car and she said, “Uck! Jaguars are ugly.” Gulp. “What’s your favorite luxury car?” I asked. “A Lexus,” she said immediately. Next day I canceled the reservation on the hideous Jaguar and made a new one for a beautiful Lexus.
On December 31, 1999, I was a nervous man. Not nervous like most people, who were concerned about society going back to the Stone Age as soon as the clock hit midnight, but rather because I was about to ask the woman of my dreams a question I had never asked anyone before. What if she said, “No?”
I was pretty confident that she would say, “Yes!” but that didn’t stop the butterflies all throughout the day. Fortunately, the butterflies faded a bit when I picked her up in the Lexus and she had exactly the reaction of joy and excitement I was hoping for. (Thank the lord I didn’t get that repulsive Jaguar!) We went to our favorite Italian restaurant and had a delicious and romantic dinner and then we headed back to my apartment. It was show time.
Before we got out of the car, I blindfolded her. No, this wasn’t how most of our dates ended, but on this occasion there was something I had to do without her seeing. I led her into the apartment, blindfold in place, got a Zippo and began lighting the dozens of candles I had strategically placed throughout my living room and dining room. Then I put on a Frank Sinatra CD, removed her blindfold and asked her to dance. She was sufficiently giddy, but when “The Way You Look Tonight” ended and I dropped to one knee, she got even giddier. I whipped out the ring and popped the question and mercifully she said, “Yes!” pretty much right away. It was about 10:30 PM at this point and neither one of us could have been happier—even if the world was potentially going to end in 90 minutes.
Of course, 90 minutes later, the world did not end. All the Y2K disaster predictions turned out to be unwarranted and were probably just a ploy by IT guys to get paid lots of money to do busy work they knew all along was unnecessary. On January 1, 2000 life went along much as usual, except that now there were at least two people whose lives together were just about to begin. (I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that Nicole and I weren’t the only two people who got engaged that night.)
Nicole and I have been together ever since, as the cliché goes, “through good times and bad,” and no amount of technological doomsday scenarios will keep us apart. To this day while others think of Y2K in the context of “terrible tragedy averted,” I think “amazing future started.” (And I breathe I sigh of relief that I ditched that reprehensible Jaguar.)
Happy couple hours before Y2K hits.
