Funny story about Y2K. Everyone remembers the horror stories(rumors) floating around leading up to Y2K....planes falling out of the sky, all computers locking up, etc, etc. One night while traveling I was at a Holiday Inn in Opelika, AL and met a guy at the bar who was in town to give a presentation to the engineering dept at Auburn. He and I got to talking and he said the past 2 years at his job in Denver, their entire workload was researching just what would or could go wrong--if anything, at midnight Dec 31, 1999 or 12:00 am Jan 1, 2000--take your pick. He said it was 2 years of exhaustive work because he and his team of 24 other engineers had to look at every known, conceivable possibility....and then consider the unknowns.
Their conclusion finally determined very little issues would happen. Minor things such as internal clocks in some instruments built 20-30 years earlier that didn't consider those instruments would even be around in the year 2000, but easy fixes--just replace them and go on. He did say his team found one problem which would indeed be affected by Y2K. It seemed the Jeep Grand Cherokee built in certain years(like 1992-1995 or something like that) had a censor in the car's computer that could tell when your oil had been changed based on the dipstick. Something really off the wall like that. The problem would be at midnight when the clock rolled over, none of those Jeeps would be able to be started because the computer would be fooled into thinking the oil had not been changed for at least 100 years. The computer would lock out the sequence to allow starting. That's it....a Jeep that wouldn't start. I asked him what they determined the fix was and he said after Jeep was notified of the problem, Jeep was going to send out notices to all owners of that style for those years telling them their car would not start on Jan 1, and all they needed to do was pull out the dipstick....reinsert dipstick....and then turn the key. THAT was the fix for the only
known real problem for Y2K. Pull out your dipstick.