Pilot fish's company gets a new ERP package in early 1999. Implementation team works for nine months and hits the go-live date at the end of November.

A couple weeks into December, fish receives notice that the ERP vendor's tech support will be available over New Year's weekend to provide phone support -- for a premium price. "My company took a pass -- we felt pretty good about our level of Y2K readiness," says fish.

On the first business day of the year, there's a noncritical non-Y2K problem with the ERP package. Fish goes to the vendor's website and tries to create a Support Incident but can't. "I kept getting bounced out to a message stating, 'Incidents may not be created for dates prior to Dec. 1, 1756.' So I went to the phone," he says. "Their phone system was down."

Fortunately, the vendor's tech support team can still get email, so the problem is cleared up a couple hours later. And fish carefully doesn't ask the obvious questions.

"I need to keep on the good side of the vendor," he says. "I don't know if the phones had been down since 12:01 a.m. Jan. 1 or not. Maybe the tech support staff spent the weekend amazed that things were so quiet."

Make some New Year's noise for Sharky. Send me your true tale of IT life at sharky@computerworld.com. You can also comment on today's tale at Sharky's Google+ community, and read thousands of great old tales like this one from the Sharkives.

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