NIWOT, Colo. — The plastic inner workings of a hand-crank-powered radio echoed through Laura Bloom’s Niwot living room on New Year's Day 2020.
“Let’s see if I can remember,” she said while trying to fire up the rig. “You pull this out, and I guess you go like this,” she said. And with a couple of more cranks, the musical stylings of How Bizarre by OMC transported us back to the late 1990s.
Getting the radio was one of several things Bloom did in preparation for Y2K, the feared computer bug that threatened to bring computer systems worldwide to their knees when the calendar switched from 1999 to 2000.
“These are cassettes, and VCR tapes of Senate hearings. The U.S. Senate was doing constant hearings on Y2K,” explained Bloom.
These hearings, along with some thoughtful barroom conversation, and a three-day symposium she attended on the impact of the new millennium at The University of Colorado Boulder helped Bloom realize Saturday, Jan. 1, 2000, could be an impactful day.
“I thought the world was going to be different,” she said.
So, Laura Bloom did what Laura Bloom does. She prepped.
“I’m a pragmatist, and I was trying to be ready, and asses what was in my home. The things I wanted to purchase without going overboard,” explained Bloom.
She made a Y2K home assessment list to make sure all her software and hardware were ready for the change. She got a 55-gallon drum and filled it with water. She got a water purifier, a 5-gallon bucket to use as a latrine. She even invested in gold and silver.
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“I did pretty well on that several years later. I waited until it went up and sold that,” she said.
Bloom also got an off-road bicycle in case gas became unavailable. She had a hand-powered flashlight and plenty of food. Unfortunately, she canceled a trip she had been planning to Belize.
“I got pretty paranoid, and I decided I didn’t want to be stuck in a third world country. I was supposed to go on my first dive trip. I did not go, and I still haven’t gone on my first dive trip,” she told us with a laugh on the first day of 2020.
Speculation about what would happen as the world moved into 2000 B.C. was rampant back then. It was on the cover of TIME Magazine, in the halls of Congress, and on every local TV station you tuned to.
“I get a little bit annoyed at people that say, 'nothing happened, why were you so worked up?’ Nothing happened because companies were working on it for five years making sure that nothing happened. The thing I was most worried about was the stuff we didn’t know about, that we didn’t think about.”
Twenty years later, Bloom doesn’t regret a single plan she made.
“I’m glad I prepped the way I did. I’m glad that I’m who I am as a person. Being somebody that wants to get my ducks in a row. Plan as best as I can, and then just sit back and relax.”
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