I called her at 7:40 last night. I had been sitting by the phone since 7 like a teenager, working up to it, with the TV on mute.

Twenty-six minutes. I timed it. Old habit. You time everything when you have spent your life paying for CPU seconds.

I am not going to put most of it down here. Most of it is hers. Here is what I can put down.

She sounds like her mother on the phone. I wasn't ready for that.

Ben is five. He started kindergarten. He likes trucks and boats and "anything with a motor. He gets that from your side," she said, and then she stopped, because my side is me.

She said she isn't ready to see me. She said I can write to Ben if I want, real letters, the paper kind, and she will read them to him. I said I would. I said I was sorry. I had said it in the letter already, but I said it out loud, and she didn't say it was all right, and I didn't want her to. It wasn't all right.

At the end she said, "Bye, Dad." Not "Goodbye, Gerald," which is what she called me the last time, on the steps of the funeral home in 1993.

This afternoon I watched the Ryder Cup. Our side went into the day down 10 to 6, and came back and won, and grown men ran out on the green and jumped around like fools. I didn't care who won. I understood them anyway.

Card in the mailbox. Blue envelope, Atlanta postmark, her handwriting, which hasn't changed since the fourth grade. She still makes a capital G like a 6.

Read it standing in the driveway. Read it again inside, sitting down. Read it a third time on the boat.

It isn't long. It says she got my letter. It says she doesn't know what she wants yet. It says she has a son, Benjamin, who is five. I knew that from my sister Ruth. I didn't know Laura would tell me herself.

At the bottom, her phone number, and: "Call Saturday the 25th after 7. He's asleep by then."

That's a week. I have waited six years. I can wait a week. I don't know that I can wait a week.

Floyd came through overnight. Here in Charlotte we got wind and rain and a pine limb on the carport, nothing more. Down east is another story. The rivers are coming up.

Becky on our test team is from Greenville, and her folks live near the Tar River. Phones are out. She sat at her terminal this morning looking at the same screen for an hour. Scott told her go home. She said there was nothing to do at home but watch TV.

So I took her test scripts for the day: the nightly batch for Tuesday, 02/29/2000. Three hundred pages of printout to check against expected results. I don't mind. I'm good at it. I told her go find a phone that works and call people. She went.

Nobody should have to learn about a flood from the Weather Channel.

9/9/99.

For the non-programmers: back when disk and tape cost real money, we used every trick. One was a string of nines meaning "no date," or "never expires," or "end of file." 99/99/99. 9999. If some program somewhere took 9/9/99 to mean "stop," then today it might look at the calendar and stop.

I wrote a tape job in 1971 that used 99 as a terminator. That job is long gone. I checked anyway, three weeks ago, because I couldn't remember for certain.

The bank set up a war room. Coffee, doughnuts, a conference phone line, everybody in by 6 a.m. Nothing happened. Nothing happened all day. By noon Scott ordered pizza out of pure relief.

Nothing happening is the whole job. Nobody writes a newspaper story about the bridge that didn't fall down. Suits me.

Kyle, age 24, took a half day to stand in line for some new video game machine that came out today. He said it was a historic date. I said I know, son, I was in the war room.

Labor Day. Took TWO DIGITS out on Lake Norman by myself at 7 a.m., before the jet skis woke up. Fog on the water. A heron standing in the shallows like he was waiting on a bus.

Cut the motor in a cove and drifted and ate a sausage biscuit and thought about Laura at six years old, on Lake Wylie, in a johnboat I borrowed from a man at church. She caught a bream about the size of my hand and cried because she wanted to let it go, and I'd already put it on the stringer. So we let it go. It swam off crooked. She waved at it.

Nothing about the letter yet. Thirteen days. Mail from Charlotte to Atlanta takes two. I know that. I checked the box twice today anyhow, and there is no mail on Labor Day.

Mailed it.

Seven drafts, longhand, on a yellow legal pad. I typed the first one and it read like a system specification. So I wrote it by hand, and it came out worse spelled and better.

I won't put the letter up here. I'll say what I told her, short: that she was right about 1993. That I was at the bank the weekend her mother was dying because we had the merger conversion, and I told myself they couldn't do it without me. They could have. They've done plenty without me since. That I have had six years to think about which things can't be done without you, and it's a short list, and she's on it.

Ruth gave me the address. Ruth has been the switchboard in this family since 1993 and she is tired of it.

Thirty-three cents. I drove it to the post office instead of using the box at the end of the road. Didn't trust the box.

Work talk. Skip it if you want.

The problem, for anybody who still doesn't get it: we stored years in two digits. PIC 99. 1966 was 66. That saved two bytes a date, and when you have forty million records and disk costs what it cost, two bytes is money. Nobody who did it was stupid. We all figured the programs would be replaced long before 2000. They weren't. Here I am.

Two ways to fix it. You can expand the field to four digits, which means changing the record layout, every copybook, every program that touches the file, and converting the file. Or you can "window" it: leave the data alone and teach the program to figure the century. Our window is 50. Two-digit year under 50, it's 20-something. Fifty and up, 19-something. Not pretty. Works till 2050, and I won't be around to be embarrassed.

Then you test. We have a test system where we roll the clock forward and run the whole nightly batch as if it's 12/31/1999, then 01/01/2000, then 02/28, 02/29 and 03/01/2000. Yes, 2000 is a leap year. Divisible by 100 says no, divisible by 400 says yes. Two of the kids didn't know that. I didn't either at their age.

Today the test system found a bug in a date routine for loan accruals. It decided January 2000 came before December 1999 and figured a customer's car loan was ninety-nine years past due.

I wrote that routine. In 1977. My initials are in the comments.

The kids thought it was the funniest thing they ever saw. Priya printed the comment block and taped it to my monitor: GV 03/77. I had it fixed and tested by 3 o'clock. I'm prouder of that than I ought to be, and more ashamed of the other part than I let on.

Bought a boat.

1991 nineteen-foot center console, 115-horse outboard, trailer, two life jackets that smell like a basement. Bought her off a dentist in Mooresville who is getting divorced and wanted her gone. Paid cash. Y2K paid for it: fourteen months as a contractor at the bank at eighty-five dollars an hour, which is more than they paid me for a whole day when I started there in 1966, running a card sorter.

I retired in 1994. Early buyout. I was 58 and done. Then in the spring of 1998 they called. Seems everybody who knew how the old programs worked had retired or died, and I was the one who hadn't died.

Named her TWO DIGITS. Painted it on the back myself.

Scott, the team lead (31, a good kid, wears a tie on Mondays for reasons of his own), made me this home page on his lunch hour. He said everybody has a home page now. I said I have a home. He said, "Then write something in it, Gerry."

So. My name is Gerry Voss. I'm 63. I'm a widower. I have a daughter, Laura, who is 36, and who I have not spoken to since March of 1993. That is the other thing this page is going to be about, I expect. I'll get to it.