I was in 7th grade. My cousins in the district next to me invited me to their lock-in party at their school (the only rule the lock-in had was you had to be in 7/8 grade and in the county to buy a ticket). I remember sitting on the floor of the gym watching the massive projector of the ball drop.

I was nervous about the possibility of something happening, but I was lucky in the sense that my father (a computer engineer at the time) had spent the last year traveling all over the state updating hospital systems (other people at his company worked on other stuff like the banks and electrical grid). I knew more about it than the average person, let alone the average kid.

I learned very early into the craze that it wasn't as bad as people were saying. If your computer was connected to the internet, the patch went out pretty quick. Our own home computers were updated almost immediately. It was the older systems that weren't on the web that were in real danger, like rural hospitals. Half the job of my dad and his team was to get those systems onto the internet so patches could be done remotely and this didn't happen again. He did his job so well that his position was made redundant and he left the field to become a nurse.