this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
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- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
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I was administering a small part of a system, probably 1/3rd of the entire server environment. There was another team doing the financial software and another team doing the hardware side.
But, yeah, society as a whole I think did notice. There was an up-tick in "prepperdom" or whatever you want to call it, especially when this story broke:
https://www.waterworld.com/drinking-water-treatment/article/16193307/committee-warns-of-y2k-dangers-in-water-industry
I had a lot of non-technical people asking me what it was all about and I explained it like this:
Let's say, on 1/1, the government has decided to issue everbody new quarters and all your old quarters are going to go away.
1:1 - you won't lose any money, but the new quarters they're handing out won't work in ANY vending machine. Everything with a coin slot needs to be updated.
Now, if you have the proper tools, and knowledge, updating one machine is not a big deal.
But now you have to update every machine on your block, in your neighborhood, in your city, in your county, in your state, in the entire country, in the whole world...
Suddenly the scale is far, far bigger.
To this day, I'm stunned we pulled it off without more problems. There was the "horseless carriage" bit noted above, there was another problem with a taxi system in, I wanna say Thailand?
Singapore! I wasn't that far off!
https://money.cnn.com/1999/01/12/technology/y2k_moneyline/