Avril MacRory was bundling her son's rugby kit into the washing machine when she remembered to telephone the King of Tonga. "It was at that moment that the incongruity of the job finally hit me," she says.
This was a reference to one of the more unpleasant aspects of being head of the Millennium Event, which the BBC is co-producing with WGBH Boston: having to inform His Majesty that august bodies, including NASA and the Greenwich Observatory, decided Tonga would not be the first place to see the sun rise in the new millennium.
"It was unwelcome news you might say, because the parliament in Tonga had actually passed a law changing the country's time zones, in order to have an extra hour of daylight saving time. But apparently, in the southern hemisphere in December, the sun rises from the south-east, from Antarctica in fact, and Tonga is too far north to be first["], says Ms MacRory.
Instead of going to Tonga, the BBC's Foreign Editor John Simpson is travelling to an uninhabited South Pacific coral atoll known as Caroline Island - now renamed Millennium Island - which is part of the Kiribati nation.
Sorting out coverage of the first millennium sunrise is only one of the myriad logistical problems that crop up with a 28-hour live television broadcast, billed as the most ambitious in the history of television. It starts at 9.30 a.m. on New Year's Eve on BBC 1, and aims to track world events as they happen across the time zones, with the first live satellite link-up scheduled for 10 a.m. GMT, which will be midnight in Kiribati.
But there's no doubt that heading up the project - known as 2000 Today - has given Ms MacRory a wealth of experiences: foreign trips, lunches with celebrities and meetings with the best-known faces on television.
During her 10 years in RTE, where she became the youngest head of variety and music, she worked on major outside broadcast events such as the Dublin millennium celebrations in 1987. But this is television on a global scale, linking across not only all departments within the BBC but with international television companies.
Does she find it tough dealing with television egos? "I don't think I am tough, not in a horrible way, but I think I'm very determined and I do think you've got to have enthusiasm."
The BBC started planning its millennium coverage three years ago, and is acting as host broadcaster for a consortium of 60 international television companies who agreed to pool technical and production resources. More than 2,000 cameras and 78 satellites will broadcast millennium celebrations from the Sydney Opera House, the pyramids, London's Millennium Dome and Time Square in New York amongst others.
As a member of the consortium, RTE will have access to all this material, which is to be fed in by the national broadcasters, collated in six BBC studios in and retransmitted as a continuous programme. The technique is a global version of the system used to cover a British general election, when dozens of live sources are merged to create one long programme.
Ireland's contribution will include a specially composed piece of music from Donal Lunny, working with musicians from Celtic countries, which will be performed live from Dublin into the global broadcast.
Ms MacRory came to the BBC in 1993 to take up the post of head of music programmes, which includes responsibility for broadcasts of the Proms, opera and ballet. Before that she had spent five years as Commissioning Editor Music Programmes in Channel Four television. It was the invitation from Channel 4 that persuaded her to leave Dublin after 10 years in RTE.
"I was enjoying life in Dublin hugely - we had a house, a three-year-old son and the last thing we were thinking of was a move, but I decided to come to London to get the experience of the interview board, and then when the job was offered, we had to sit up until 5 a.m. and decide whether to go or not.
With her son and husband - former RTE floor manager, Val Griffin - she came to London on a four-year contract in October 1988, and set out to find a house with as much green space around as possible. They settled in Wandsworth Common in a house with a large garden, and have "never regretted" the move.
Her son Sam is now 14, and her husband has built up a freelance career in London. Her last trip home to Dublin was for the final Late Late Show - she had worked with Gay Byrne for several years in RTE .
It is a meteoric jump from planning television coverage of the Proms to overseeing the corporation's biggest broadcast. Initially, her involvement in the millennium coverage was as a departmental head, but then she was asked to get a general overview of ideas from across the production departments to expand the idea of millennium coverage away from the realm of "history programmes about the 20th century," she says.
"I was head of music, so I wasn't in competition with any of the production departments here, and I think that helped to win trust." She took overall responsibility as head of the millennium event 18 months ago.
Working 16-hour days, sometimes seven days a week, Ms MacRory has not seen much of her home recently. Her husband and son have been "unbelievably patient", and a big holiday in Australia and New Zealand is promised for the spring.
The broad brushstrokes are now well in place, and now the haggles at the editorial meetings are over "30 seconds here and there". Newcomers to the core team are having to hit the ground running. Some time ago, Mac Rory had the countdown clock removed from her computer screen, as it was making her nauseous.
"At this stage, my big worry is how to keep awake for 36 hours, surviving on adrenaline, coffee and cigarettes - no millennium bubbly for me."