I have been thinking about this a lot since the pandemic, and Rob Napier on Mastodon summarized this really well:

I spent a lot of time in the 90s working on Y2K. It wasn’t a huge panic. It was just a slice out of everything else we spent auditing code. It wasn’t “spend 80 hours a week fixing this.” It was just boring. Incredibly boring. And we made it be ok by being bored and fixing stuff.

And the one thing I never thought would happen was that people would say it was never a problem. Oh good grief, it was a problem. All over. We just fixed it. Like we thought grownups should do when there’s a problem.

There are some good responses to the post and the original post it quoted. This one was brilliant in its vulgarity:

My analogy for this is that I work to maintain a kind of public sewer system. You never think about sewers... until you’re up to your neck in shit.

This isn’t just about Y2K and COVID, of course. It’s also about the invisible work of people who make well-behaved menus, and all the other things like that.