Remember when the world was going to end because the computers were messed up?

Today, my wife and I went to Boston to meet up with an old friend of hers who's in town on vacation with his 13-year-old niece.

He's a funny guy, and she seemed like a really great kid. At one point, we were talking about various things she wouldn't know about by virtue of being only 13 -- after all, she was a newborn around the time of 9/11 -- when I brought up Y2K.

Remember Y2K, the worry that because computers used "00" for the year, they would pretty much all stop working at the stroke of midnight Jan. 1, 2000, and therefore cause the entire world to descend into chaos?

I spent New Year's Eve 1999 watching the amazing coverage on CNN, and that night I went to First Night in Albany with my brother and a bunch of his friends, still the only one I've ever been to. We watched a couple performers, walked around a bit in the cold and then watched a countdown on a giant screen set up on the outside of what was Pepsi Arena and is now the Times Union Center.

At midnight, I looked around to see if anything horrible had happened. It didn't appear there were any issues, but then I heard a loud bang. Just when I started to wonder what it was, I turned around to see the fireworks going on behind me.

That was the noise. We all ran down the street to see the fireworks, called our ride to come get us and went back to one of my brother's friends' houses. I then went home and watched some more CNN.

So as I was explaining the Y2K hysteria to the 13-year-old sitting across the table from me, she looked at me a little like I was crazy.

And I have to admit, as I was telling her about it, it seemed pretty silly.

I do seriously wonder about people sometimes

My wife and I went to the local McDonald's drive-through last night after I picked her up from the train. We normally get pizza Tuesday nights (the staff is not just familiar with my regular order of a large pizza with half cheese and half sausage, they know it's us regardless of who calls) and go out Thursday nights, but there was nothing to make for dinner in our house, so to the Golden Arches it was.

The drive-through was a little backed up, so it was a few minutes before we could order, but while I was talking to the disembodied voice on the other side of the speaker, a few people must have gotten their orders in pretty quick succession, because some of the cars in front of me pulled ahead, leaving a gap between me and the corner people pulled around to get to the pay window.

And as soon as I started to pull away, a minivan dive-bombed that very gap. First of all, yes, you can dive-bomb with a minivan (who knew?), and secondly, if I had pulled away a couple seconds earlier, his little power move (again, it's a minivan, so the term "power move" is perhaps more an approximation) would have resulted in a collision, which would have made what followed that much more interesting.

I think we can pretty much all agree that cutting in line is generally not cool, although if you're going to just stare at the cab pulling into the taxi stand during an epic New York City rainstorm, I will do it again. However, there's cutting in line, and then there's cutting in line at a restaurant drive-through after the place you give your order.

This, combined with what I could clearly see was the distinct bright yellow wrapping of a McDonald's cheeseburger, meant a complaint was in the offing.

I will not be such a hypocrite as to denounce complaining, since I have been known to toss off epic rants both in the restaurant and on Facebook about Wendy's staff insisting on giving me a cheeseburger when I ask for a hamburger because hamburgers aren't on the menu, even though anyone with even moderate intelligence above the age of 7 knows that a "hamburger" is a specific thing, and that thing does not have cheese on it.

However, there is at least a tiny bit of protocol to complaining, and nowhere in that protocol is there anything about going back through the drive-through if the problem happened at the drive-through. You park your vehicle, walk inside, flag down an employee and calmly (or not-so-calmly ... see "me at Wendy's") describe the error and seek correction.

So what this guy was doing, which from what I could hear was over requesting two plain cheeseburgers but only getting one, was bad enough. What's worse was that it clearly threw the entire staff off their game.

I do not know the mechanics of a drive-through, since the McDonald's I worked at in college was in a mall and therefore didn't have one. However, there must be a system where the staff knows to take the money and give out the food from the first order on the list to the first car in line, the second to the second and so on.

But when someone cuts that line, clearly no one knows what to do. At the pay window, the kid didn't know how much I was supposed to pay him. Out of sympathy for him due to the jerkwad I just saw him deal with, I calmly repeated my order multiple times, and eventually they got it right.

Then, when I pulled up to the window for my food, they gave me a salad. We did not order a salad. I don't eat salads, and my wife does not get them from McDonald's. I, calmly again, repeated my order, and we eventually did get it.

So all of that was bad enough, and a master class on being an a-hole. Yet as I thought about it more, I realized it was actually worse than I thought.

You see, confronted with an incorrect order, he went through whatever thought process he went through, and decided the best course of action was to go back through the drive-through to address it, even if it meant cutting off a whole line of cars and/or taking the chance that there would either be no breaks in the line or that he would cause an accident.

May I never be driving in the opposite direction from him should he be turning left.

Ten years

Afterglow

I'd like the memory of me to be a happy 

one,

I'd like to leave an afterglow of smiles when

day is gone.

I'd like to leave an echo whispering softly

down the ways,

Of happy times, and laughing times, and 

bright and sunny days.

I'd like the tears of those who grieve to

dry before the sun,

Of happy memories that I leave when life is

done.

That poem is framed on top of my dresser, my wife having given it to me, I'm guessing for a wedding anniversary. It was on the cards handed to mourners at the funeral of my best friend Chuck, who died 10 years ago.

Chuck was 31. It was cancer. The last time I saw him alive was the previous October. He was undergoing treatment in Boston, and so my wife and I went to visit. We watched the Yankees-Red Sox playoff game (the one where Pedro threw Zimmer on the ground) with his mother and sister. He was like he always was ... jovial, upbeat, ready with a wisecrack at any moment.

When I started this here place to share musings about life, I borrowed a phrase from another one of my high school friends, "life's rich pageant." Chuck's life was not only a rich pageant, but it was one where everyone was invited, and everyone was treated like the guest of honor.

When you grow up in a small town, not only does everyone know everyone else, but the kids are likely to have gone to school together pretty much from the first day of school to graduation. At least that's how it was where I grew up; the members of my senior class who had gone to our school since the beginning posed for a picture in one of the kindergarten classrooms, and it was just about half of us.

Because he went to kindergarten in the morning and I went in the afternoon, I don't think I actually met Chuck until first grade, but the next 25 years were full of classroom cutups, baseball games, football on the playground, volleyball in the park, 10-cent wing nights, tennis until they turned the lights off, a New Year's Eve party in an ice storm, my wedding day and so much more than I can possibly remember.

He was my closest friend, my favorite teammate and my best opponent. Yet even as I saw him work his magic for all those years, I never quite got what made him special. Sure, he was kind and funny and warm and a lot of fun to be around, but the secret to his charisma escaped me until recently.

The mother of his two oldest boys asked me to write something about him last year for a project she was putting together so the boys (the older of whom is now in college) could know more about their father. I don't know whatever became of the project, but it gave me a chance to think about the kind of person Chuck was.

And that's when it hit me.

Like most people, Chuck had a crew of regulars that he ran with, but whether it was us, the kids from down the street who would show up to volleyball, my grandfather at the restaurant after my ballgame/bachelor party (without details, when Chuck showed up for the wedding, Grandpa greeted him with, "Hey, Radar"), the customers at the various Friendly's restaurants where he worked or whomever ... not only did he draw people in, he made all of them feel important.

As I said, everyone was the guest of honor.

I get angry sometimes when I think about Chuck. It's not anger over anything he ever did, as I'm not sure we ever had so much as a quarrel, and if we did it never lasted long, but anger as to why he, of all people, had to come down with cancer and die when he was 31 years old.

I get angry that his parents lost a son, that his siblings lost their brother, that his children lost their father ... and yes, although I'm way down the list, that I lost my best friend. And so did a lot of other people.

The organizers of my high school class reunion asked us to bring any pictures we had of Chuck. I brought one from my wedding (where, by the way, he drove the priest batty while leaving the rest of us in hysterics) and gave it to our friend Renee afterward. But he should have been there, at our table, the center of everything. 

We're all in our 40s now, and Chuck should be here with us. When we all talk about times gone by, it should be kicking back somewhere, exaggerating every little thing and laughing our fool heads off, but also creating new memories as we go. 

Those times gone by shouldn't be all we have left of him, but they are, and as angry as him being gone can make me, I know those times gone by and the memories created are mine, and whatever it is that decided to take him away 10 years ago can't take those away.

And while I miss him every single day, Chuck left enough happy memories for the last 10 years, the next 10 years and all the 10 years after that.