While tidying up the basement yesterday, I pulled down an unlabelled file box that turned out to have some writing on the back.

This is a relic of Year 2000 prepping in Canada’s largest city.

I worked at the Daily Bread Food Bank in Toronto from 1994 until 2001. In January 2000, DBFB was located at 530 Lakeshore Boulevard West at the foot of Bathurst Street in the original Loblaws warehouse. Built in the 1920s, it was a massive, dusty, slightly-scary building, but as we paid no rent to our landlords, Wittington Properties, the real estate arm of the Loblaws grocery chain, to us it was home sweet home.

Part of my job was looking after the DBFB archives. We didn’t have much money, so I was always on the lookout for clean, gently-used file boxes that occasionally came in filled with donations of non-perishable food that I could reuse for storage. I plucked this beauty from a pile at the side of the loading dock after its contents had been emptied into a larger box ready for the sorting procedure we used for public donations during the first week of 2000.

The turning of the clock from December 31, 1999 to January 1, 2000 had people a little freaked out, and many started to prepare by purchasing extra food in case computer glitches caused transportation issues and the food supply ran short.

Short term businesses popped up that would deliver a pallet of food and household necessities to your home designed to get you through the complete break down of society. I even knew people who were preparing for (and looking forward to) the “end times” and the return of Jesus Christ, but who also bought a lot of extra food and water….just in case.

Governments planned well in advance for any possible issues and Daily Bread was included in that planning. Toronto was estimated to have a three day supply of food on hand at any time in grocery stores, warehouses, the Ontario Food Terminal, and the large manufacturing factories of companies like Campbell and Kraft. After those supplies were used up, well, there would be panic.

I’m probably not giving away any important secrets now to reveal that if the Y2K bug had caused widespread disruption, Daily Bread (and probably other similar organizations) would have been taken over by the government, the building protected by the military, and the food we had on hand (which could be millions of pounds) would have been distributed to the general public.

Knowing about this planning meant I not only bought some extra food and bottled water myself, but I filled my car with gas, got a few hundred dollars out of the bank, and was prepared to hightail it out of Toronto and drive to PEI as fast as I could if things went sideways. My parents always had masses of food preserved and, well, we are resilient in rural PEI in a way a major city just isn’t; I had seen how messed up Toronto could get after a big snow storm and didn’t want to white knuckle the end of the world there.

In the end, nothing much happened when the year 2000 started, except people realised they didn’t need all the Chef Boyardee and Kraft Dinner they had in their cupboards and wanted to donate it to the food bank, which was a happy bonus for us. I believe the file box I have came from one of the large office buildings in the downtown business district, where employees decided to set up their own collection bins so they could toss in their extra non-perishables on their way to work.

All the details of the impromptu Y2K food drive we launched escaped me, but I found this Globe and Mail interview with our executive director, Sue Cox, from that time that fills in the blanks. Sue was a great boss and a lot of fun, as the last sentence shows!

Y2K bust proves a boon for food banks

John Gray

Toronto

Published January 10, 2000

The Y2K bug that didn't bite has proven to be a windfall for some of the needy in the Toronto region.

The Daily Bread Food Bank estimates that about 13,500 kilograms of food have been contributed from stockpiles that nervous residents had built up in the event of a turn-of-the-century disaster.

When the possible disaster did not happen, Daily Bread issued a public appeal that the unneeded goods be dropped off at firehalls and Loblaws supermarkets in the greater Toronto region.

Sue Cox, executive director of Daily Bread, said there had been "a nice response" throughout the region.

Although not even a partial tally of donations will be completed until tomorrow, and contributions may continue for some time, Ms. Cox said preliminary estimates suggested there have been at least 30,000 pounds (13,500 kilograms) of food contributed.

She thought most of the contributions really had come from people who feared the world's computer systems would stagger, if not collapse, from complications of entering a new century and who stocked up on food as a precaution.

She cited an encounter with one woman who arrived at a firehall with about 22 kilograms of food that she had stored in her basement as a hedge against a crippled computer infrastructure.

Pronouncing herself pleased with the results, Ms. Cox said she had never conducted a millennial food drive before and did not really expect ever to conduct another.

I actually went to work on January 1, 2000 even though the food bank was closed not because I was a workaholic (though I was, a bit), but I was in charge of the computer network and telephone system and was curious to see if everything was still chugging along.

Our computer network was 30 donated 386 and 486 computers and a few printers. Our server was a 586 Compaq desktop running a Novell product. We had two fax machines. There was only one computer connected to the internet, located in our mail/fax room, and I would log onto it to send or receive the odd email, but it wasn’t connected to our internal network at all, the best firewall ever.

DBFB had a very simple website that was hosted and updated free of charge by a company with headquarters downtown. We referred to our website in our marketing, but it got very little traffic.

I spent most Saturdays in November and December 1999 testing the computers for Y2K compatibility using a disc that had been sent to us by the federal government. I can’t remember what happened if a computer failed the test, but I probably patched the Windows operating system somehow and moved on to the next computer.

We had an amazing HP printer, a LaserJet 4. It was an astonishing workhorse. It printed hundreds of pages a week in our dusty office, rarely jamming. I cleaned a mouse nest out of it once and it just kept going. I had it repaired by a technician who came to the food bank a couple of times when it stopped working, and he would replace a part and get it going again.

Somehow I found out that there was a chance the LaserJet 4 wouldn’t work properly or connect to our intranet, so the first thing I did on that January 1 was boot my computer and send a page to print on the LaserJet 4, and of course it worked. That little beauty was still chugging away when I moved back to PEI in 2001.