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SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:
Time now for StoryCorps. At the end of 1999, there was high anxiety about a potential computer glitch, known as the Y2K bug. Some believed that at midnight, when the year turned over to 2000, computers would malfunction and society worldwide would crumble. Some thought this was nonsense, but not 18-year-old Erin Maloney (ph). She rallied a small group to wait out the apocalypse in an old house in the woods.
ALEC LIVELY: Your confidence is kind of the driving force. You know, you found a group of people that were just all so willing to do about anything.
MCCAMMON: That's Alec Lively (ph). He and Erin sat down at StoryCorps to talk about those final days of 1999.
ERIN MALONEY: We were a bunch of kids in Nowheresville, New Hampshire, trying to build a place in the world where we could be safe in case something happened. The house was sort of like a hunting cabin, I guess, and I remember we had to tie a hose to the bathroom sink and bathe out on the deck in the middle of winter.
LIVELY: We didn't have any technology.
MALONEY: Just a landline, old-school with the curly wire, and that was our only means of contact with the outside world. We were all dumb as rocks. There was a party almost every night, and we never actually saved any food (laughter).
LIVELY: We had that freeze-dried stuff in the basement.
MALONEY: You ended up eating at all.
LIVELY: Did I?
MALONEY: Yeah (laughter).
LIVELY: That sounds right.
MALONEY: In order to stay at the property, the owner wanted us to have this military survival training to make us better protectors of the place. Bob, the guy who trained us, was ex-Marine.
LIVELY: That was my first real experience with firearms.
MALONEY: At one point, he had us disassembling and reassembling Colt 45s.
LIVELY: Yeah. Yeah, you think you can still do it?
MALONEY: Hell no.
LIVELY: I remember doing all the ropes training and thinking, well, if I ever need to repel, things have gone real wrong.
MALONEY: New Year's Eve - we had a moment of silence at midnight. And then we were searching the news for any weirdness that was going on outside, and it was nothing.
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UNIDENTIFIED NEWS ANCHOR: Happy New Year here. Welcome to our Millennium special. We're happy to say the lights are still on, computers are still on, planes are flying. Life is continuing. It appears the threat...
MALONEY: It was a hell of an anticlimax. The four or five of us sat together upstairs in the pig pile area where all the blankets and pillows were, and we talked about sort of next steps.
LIVELY: When nothing happened, it really solidified for me, like, don't trust most of these giant theories. I was so lost back then, and I looked for radical ways to find that sense of purpose.
MALONEY: Well, we were definitely raw cut gems back then.
LIVELY: How long did you stay there after that?
MALONEY: Not long. It was like a month or two. You know, I was starting to go over all the things that I potentially regret from that period in my life, but it was the only path for me.
LIVELY: Yeah.
MALONEY: We were kids. We had to go through these things, and we came out the other side.
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MCCAMMON: Alec Lively now works in IT, and Erin Maloney is a paralegal and a mom. Their interview is archived at the Library of Congress. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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