A Canadian Man Just Came Out Of The Y2K Bunker He’s Been In For The Past 14 Years (Or Maybe Not)

(UPDATE: According to a few of our commenters, the interview this post was inspired by was aired on a satirical Canadian program. Well done, Canadian funny people responsible for this. They say that good satire is often indistinguishable from reality — still, our apologies for not being familiar with the show. We so wanted to believe.)

Nearly fourteen years ago, the world was supposed to end. Because computer programmers had foolishly forgotten to include four digits for the year on computer clocks, the Y2K bug was going to destroy everything. People built bunkers, stockpiled food, and generally prepared for society to end. Norman Feller was among them… and fourteen years later, he’s finally come out of his bunker.

Feller claims to have spent more than a decade underground. He was part of a group he refers to as the “fifteen year preppers,” people who believed it would take a decade and a half for the chaos caused by a reset glitch to be fixed and the world to return to normal.

Feller came out early because, well, he was bored. As he himself puts it in a CBC interview:

“You have to understand that fifteen years is a long time when you’re by yourself in a windowless bunker. Also, I became curious as to whether or not I was right, and I chose to come up.”

Among his other surprises, he can’t believe Friends is over, but that The Simpsons is still on the air, and he’s more than a little shocked you can’t smoke indoors. He also asks, at one point, what happened to all the music stores.

In case you think he’s pulling everyone’s leg, the interview isn’t entirely fun and games; the guy’s life is obviously something of a mess. Feller admits, at one point in the interview, that he wasted more than a decade of his life, and some of the CBC’s piece features him visiting his ex-wife to apologize for his behavior and awkwardly interact with her new husband.

Feller does have a good point at the end of the piece, though; maybe instead of preparing for the world to end, he should have prepared for the world to last forever. Also, there’s a pizza with a hot dog in the crust that isn’t going to eat itself — the dude has a decade of fast food innovation to catch up on.

(Image courtesy of plural on Flickr.)

×