The Foreign Service Journal, May 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2020 89 back book and at least twice as heavy. Finally, the last day of the millennium arrived: 12/31/1999. I needed to be at the embassy, together with a driver to make sure I got there; a communicator to transmit our post-apocalypse status; and, of course, on Post One the Marine security guard who had drawn the short straw. I left a boisterous “old year’s night” fete and arrived at the embassy in my purple ball gown with 20 minutes to spare. The Marine and I climbed through the window in the deputy chief of mission’s office onto the embassy roof to await the end of the world. Midnight came and went. Nothing happened. Fireworks blossomed across the city, and we could hear the strains of a hymn through the open doors of the church next door. Inside the embassy, the only incorrect date was the one on the programwe were supposed to use to confirm that we were still there. I called the ambassador at his party to report that “all was well”—and get his clearance for our terse cable response. Then it took the communicator three tries to get the cable system to read the response accurately once I had printed it out in ALL CAPS OCR FONT , which always transmogrified number 1s into letter Ls despite our best efforts. Though Y2K was anticlimactic, two months later, at the height of carnival, the power did go out—all across Port of Spain. Darkness descended, but the music played on unabated from gener- ator-driven sound trucks. All was well in Trinidad and Tobago. n The Drop (a), The Bounce (b) and The Roll (c)— the fuel delivery process in Port of Spain as the U.S. embassy prepared for Y2K in August 1999. LIANVONWANTOCH a b c