No your toaster will NOT stop working on January 1 2000. Although toasters do indeed have timing chips in them they do not refer to absolute time at all. They only pop up a few minutes after the bread was put in.

According to Ford, their customers will not be affected but they might receive letters dated 5 January 1900! I would sue Royal Mail for taking 100 years to deliver the letter, or would their computer (rightly for once) say they only took a day as that would think it was 1900?!

Imagine this scene:
The Educational Welfare Officer rings the doorbell. A very old lady answers.
EWO: Hello, is Jane Smith there?
Lady: I'm Jane Smith.
EWO: Oh dear, I was calling round to find out why you're not at school!
Lady: It's because I'm a hundred and five.
EWO: Oh dear, our computer thinks you're only five! I'll have to put that right!

Or imagine one company, call it A, places an order with another, say B, to be delivered by 1st February 2000. That date arrives but the goods have not yet come! The phone conversation goes as follows:
Ring ring, ring ring, ring ring, click
B: Good morning, company B, Sue speaking, how can I help you?
A: Good morning. We ordered some goods from you and they're due today but they haven't come yet.
B: What customer number is it?
A: 1234567
B: And what order number?
A: HJ54321
B: Our computer thinks we've still got a hundred years to deliver them. We'll correct that on the computer and get them to you as a priority.
Click

In fact, the Marks and Spencer computer nearly jetissonned a consignment of corned beef because it was 93 years out of date (The year was 98 (1998), the year in the best before date was 05 (2005)) but fortunately a human being interceded and didn't let the corned beef be jetissonned.

Here are two stories courtesy of Prof James Davenport of the University of Bath:

(1)The Swedish authorities stopped issuing passports on 1 January 1999, because then visitors' passports would expire in 2000, and their computers would say 1900, so many Swedes have had to cancel their holidays because they can't leave the country!

(2)A man travelled on a train and hadn't bought a ticket. The conductor's machine wouldn't accept his credit card because it thought it expired 99 years ago, and he had no other means of paying, so he let him travel free!

Finally, it would have been funny if the Millennium Bug caused the Millenium Dome to self-destruct!

What Really Happened

Everything carried on as normal - but the computer in charge of the River of Fire in London apparrently wasn't Y2K compliant! Neither are the Bath mailservers - look at the headers of any email from Bath during 2000, and it gives the year as 100! During 2001, it gives the year as 101!

Also, some websites displayed the year as 19100. VideoPlus wouldn't work over the millennium crossover, either.

UNIX stores the date and time as a 32-bit integer - the number of seconds since midday on 1 January 1970 (the official Birth of UNIX), so UNIX will have its own Millennium Bug at 15:14:08 on 19 January 2038...