What do you get when you combine a bunch of software developers with a perceived impending disaster? In one case, we got guns, and lots of them! The weirdest thing is how normal it all seemed.
Summer 1998
(With apologies to “The Simpsons”)
It was the dawn of Y2k. Compaq paid $9 billion to acquire Digital Equipment Corporation. Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two students at Stanford University. And a small New Hampshire software startup was helping hotels take reservations beyond Dec 31, 1999.
I was a software development contractor at that company.
If you did not live through it, Y2k was a big deal to a lot of people, particularly software developers. We knew the folly of using two digits to represent a year. It was a holdover from the days when computer RAM was expensive and preserving every possible byte was important.
Sure, Unix (and early Linuxes?) had the notion of a timestamp value, which was implemented as the number of milliseconds since the epoch (i.e., since Jan 1, 1970). Software written to compute dates using this value were more robust, but there were still lots of databases that stored dates in separate columns (day, month, and 2-digit year).
What happens when you add two days to {day: 30, month: 12, year: 99}? You end up with {day: 1, month: 1, year: 00}. It should be year: 100, but if you are only storing two digits, then only the right-two digits are preserved. This is a problem if your software assumes that your reservation check-out date has to be after your check-in date. Our main customers were local hotels, and they were unable to accept reservations for the turn of the century/millennium celebration that was barely a year and a half away.
There were other consequences, from inconvenient: not being able to renew a driver’s license because your new expiration date would be 95 years earlier, to amusing: a 104-year-old woman being sent a registration notice for Kindergarten.
Though in retrospect it was not much of a crisis, it certainly did not feel that way at the time. There were plenty of plausible scenarios that could not be reliably refuted. Two of the ones we clung to were that the outdated computers that run the nations air traffic control systems would somehow fail at midnight when the systems suddenly decided it was 1900. What would happen? Another was that the computer controllers in the power grid would shut off when they did some match and concluded that they had not been serviced or inspected in the past 90-plus years.
For the remainder of this story, pretend you do not know how it turned out, and try to imagine how you might feel if you worked for a company where your coworkers were convinced that much of civilization could stop and collapse right after 11:59 PM on December 31, 1999.
My Job
As I said, I worked for a small company mostly working with local hotels to help them collect reservations. Our solution was comically simple. Year 2000 was a leap year, so its calendar lined up perfectly with the calendar from 1972 (the calender tends to repeat every 28 years). The solution was to set all of the computers’ clocks back 28 years, but patch their UI systems to quietly add those 28 years back. A human operator had no problem thinking that January 2, 00 was after December 31, 99. Thus, we had a workable, if odd, solution.
In Case of Emergency
As important as we thought our jobs were, I honestly cannot remember much of the code we delivered. What I remember most was the culture of the company itself.
Almost everyone at the company was well versed in survival. They knew lots and lots about living without electricity, alternative heat sources, hunting and fishing, food storage, and weapons.
It was serious business for many of my colleagues, and they were eager to share their knowledge and expertise.
I recall the first day I was brought into the “inner circle,” as it were. One of my coworkers invited me over to his desk to show me his personal handgun of choice. He kept it locked in the bottom drawer of his desk, but showed me where to find the key “in case of an emergency.” He was not clear on what such an emergency might be.
At that point in my life, I think I had only held and fired a gun a couple of times in my life, at a professional shooting range, so was not too keen on grabbing his under any circumstances. I told him this, and asked who else knew he kept a gun in his desk.
His reply shocked me. He said that it was probably OK, as just about everyone else in the office was armed all the time. As it turned out, I was one of maybe half a dozen employees who did not have a firearm of some sort in my desk or on my person.
Not only were weapons not prohibited at the office, they seemed to be actively encouraged.
Let’s Go Shooting
Once I had been introduced to the open secret, I started to be invited to go target shooting. Having only fired a gun a few times, and only at indoor firing ranges, I decided to tag along as a spectator. We would often visit a local outdoor range that was only a few minutes down the road. Other times we would simply venture into the woods behind the office. Apparently New Hampshire law permits this, as long as you maintain a safe distance from residences and public roads.
This turned out to be a pretty regular event, and one sanctioned by the owners of the company.
A Sense of Normalcy
What struck me as most surprising is how normal it all seemed to be. The fact that there were more firearms in the office than people (many people had more than one) did not seem to be unusual.
Seeing a gun was no more odd than seeing a knife in the kitchen. They were tools to be used when needed. Safety was stressed over all.
My coworkers were definitely enthusiasts and took care to ensure safe storage and handling of all firearms on the premises.
Sniper Rifle?
One morning I arrived at work to find a group of people gathered around another coworker’s desk. He was excitedly unpacking a large, and long, cardboard box. Inside was his latest purchase: a .50 caliber military sniper rifle from McMillan Firearms. After everyone finished “oohing” and “ahhing” over it, he invited anyone interested to join him at the outdoor range at lunch time.
This was something I could not pass up.
When we arrived, he announced that the ammunition for the rifle was expensive, about $3 per round. Some of the rounds were “tracer rounds,” which makes the shot visible to the naked eye, even during the day. I am not sure why a military sniper would want to use those, but the effect on the firing range was pretty cool.
As you can imagine, the appearance of a real military-grade rifle at the range caused quite a stir. That particular range is frequented by local and state police, and we quickly drew a crowd. Many of the police in attendance were impressed, and some asked if they could fire it. If you have ever been around an exotic car, that is what it was like.
The Y2k Whimper
On December 7, 98 (yes, that was intentional), the company announced that it was out of money. Apparently despite the fear being generated throughout the world, it was not enough to keep us in business. Our firm shut its doors that Friday, more than a year before the non-event that was Y2k.
Aftermath
The company closing is not the end of the story, however. Shortly after Christmas I got a call from my manager, asking for my assistance. He needed help moving some of the office equipment from our former building into a new, smaller space, one town over. He said in exchange for my help, I could take a desk and a chair. They were pretty sturdy, and I needed a desk, so I agreed.
We met at the office, loaded a bunch of furniture into his minivan, drove it to the new site, and unloaded and assembled it in the new place. I think we worked for about two or three hours.
I know what you are probably thinking. I had just helped him steal a bunch of office equipment. Maybe. Maybe not. I honestly do not know.
A few days later I got a call from another former coworker, asking me to meet him in Manchester for lunch. He gave me the address, and I met him there the next day.
He said as an added “thank you,” from my former manager, he was going to take me to the indoor range and shoot his fully-automatic rifle. That sounded like fun, so I agreed.
He brought a Glock 23, as memory serves. It is a semi-automatic .40 caliber pistol. I rented some eye and ear protective gear, bought some paper targets and a box of ammunition, and he showed me how to load and fire it. The Glock has a heavy trigger pull, that is it requires a great deal of force to pull the trigger, and thus is one of the few pistols without a safety switch. It is a double-action firearm, meaning there is no reason to “cock” the gun before firing. We went through the box of ammunition and compared our targets. He was a much better shot than I.
As promised, he also brought his personally-owned H&K MP5. It has three modes of operation: semiautomatic, one round per trigger pull; burst, three rounds per trigger pull; and continuous fire, where it would continue firing rounds until you let go of the trigger or ran out of ammunition.
In my admittedly uneducated opinion, the MP5 is far better example of an “assault rifle” than the oft-maligned AR-15. First, the MP5 I fired was fully-automatic, whereas the AR-15 is semiautomatic.
Second, it has a much shorter barrel and would be far superior in close quarters, or during an assault, if you will.
As I said, my opinions were formed from this single experience. I cannot claim any further expertise.
Firing the MP5 was not at all what I expected. I had envisioned what you see in the movies: holding the rifle near my waist or chest and emptying the entire 100-round magazine in one pull. Nope. Throughout my time firing it, I kept the stock pulled tightly against my right shoulder, as I sighted down the barrel towards my target.
My patient instructor informed me that even with a fully-automatic rifle, you will almost never want to use it in that mode. He kept it in semi-auto mode most of the time, where it functioned as a normal rifle with very little recoil. In fact, it was very easy to aim and fire. Next, he let me try burst mode. Each trigger pull fired three rounds.
What I learned at that moment is why many of these rifles have a front grip. Firing in burst or fully-auto mode causes the barrel of the rifle to rise. The front grip allows you to keep a tighter hold on it, so that you can maintain control. You do not want to lose control while firing and end up shooting something above you.
The barrel also gets incredibly hot. Accidentally brushing it with a finger is a quick way to get burned.
Finally, he did allow me to set the selector switch to fully-auto and empty what was left in the magazine. As he had predicted, it was very difficult to keep the muzzle level and pointed downrange. Had he not warned me ahead of time, it is likely I would have lost control of it.
The Gift
Finally, we were out of ammunition. He carefully packed everything back up and started to leave, asking me to carry the Glock. Then he smiled and informed me that the Glock was a gift from my former manager.
This was New Hampshire in a time before mandatory background checks. Private individuals were free to buy and sell personally-owned firearms without asking the government for permission. That may still be the case for all I know.
That was my introduction to the world of firearm ownership. Over the next few years, I made regular trips to the firing range. I took several firearms safety courses, offered by both the NRA and the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department. I eventually paid the state $10 to acquire my concealed carry permit, authorizing me to keep the Glock concealed on my person.
At one point I decided the Glock was too heavy and thick to carry concealed full time, so I traded it for a Kahr Arms K9 9mm pistol, which is much lighter and thinner. I do miss the simplicity of the Glock and sometimes wish I had kept it.
Though I no longer live in New Hampshire, own that Glock, or have a concealed carry permit, it was an educational and interesting period of my life. If nothing else, it gave me a profound respect for firearms, how to use them safely, and most importantly, how not to misuse them.
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