When Leigh Claire La Berge was fresh out of college in the late ’90s, she landed a job that happened to be Peak Late ’90s: working alongside a consultancy firm to vet an enormous company’s ability to survive the coming digital apocalypse known as Y2K. A few misbehaving toilets aside, Y2K proved to be colossally overblown, but the futility of the process was not—which makes La Berge’s meticulously documented account of the time all the funnier. A pitch-perfect chronicle of corporate mediocrity.
The objective of the media team was to inquire into the state of Y2K preparedness for the radio stations, television stations, and newspapers that were the Conglomerate’s most important global media vending partners. We would do this by mailing them a Y2K questionnaire. Within a few weeks of our dour partnership, Heather had condensed our team’s trajectory into a single PowerPoint slide featuring so many capitalized common nouns that, looking back over my notes from the time today, I get the anachronistic sense of reading late-18th-century English.
New Media Team:
- Media is Y2K mission critical
- Is designing Y2K Questionnaire
- Will be contacting Media Vendors
- Will suggest Y2K Contingency Guidelines
