I’ve written about my Nan (My Mum's Mum) before, blog here. Born on November 12th, 1910, she was orphaned at just ten years old and sent to a workhouse to train for a life in service. She was traditional working-class through and through; just buying her first terraced house was a monumental milestone in her life

Because of the world she came from, she never really understood what I did for a living. When I told her I "worked in computers," it meant absolutely nothing to her, I might as well have told her I worked on Mars. She never used a computer, and passing away in the year 2000 meant she missed the mobile revolution entirely (the iPhone didn't arrive until 2007). I can only imagine what she’d think of AI today; it would have completely blown her mind

Waiting for the "Animal"

During the late 1990s, the media was saturated with talk about the “Millennium Bug”, the massive software coding crisis regarding how computers would handle the date rollover from 1999 to 2000. Nan listened to all the panic on the news as she lived through her final years at ages 88, 89, and finally 90

She became fixated on it. She told us she wanted to stay alive just to see this infamous "Millennium Bug." To be honest, we’re pretty sure she thought it was some kind of actual, physical animal

Conclusion

On New Year's Day in the year 2000, she confessed to my mum that she’d been sitting up waiting for the bug, but nothing had happened. The world hadn't ended, and no strange creature had appeared. Having finally witnessed the turn of the century and satisfied her curiosity, her long journey came to an end. By the 27th of January, she was gone