THE Y1K BUG:

Canterbury, England. A.D. 999.
An atmosphere close to panic prevails today throughout Europe
as the millennial year 1000 approaches, bringing with it the so-called
"Y1K" Bug," a menace which, until recently, hardly anyone had ever
heard of.

Prophets of doom are warning that the entire fabric of Western
Civilization, based as it now is upon monastic computations,
could collapse, and that there is simply not enough time left to
fix the problem.

Just how did this disaster-in-the-making ever arise? Why did no
one anticipate that a change from a three-digit to a four-digit year
would throw into total disarray all liturgical chants and all metrical
verse in which any date is mentioned? Every formulaic hymn, prayer,
ceremony and incantation dealing with dated events will have to be
re-written to accommodate three extra syllables. All of the tabular
chronologies with three-space year columns, maintained for generations
by scribes using carefully hand-ruled lines on vellum sheets, will now
have to be converted to four-space columns, at enormous cost. In the
meantime, the validity of every official event, from baptisms to
burials, from confirmations to coronations, may be called into
question.

"We should have seen it coming ," says Brother Cedric of St. Michael's
Abbey, here in Canterbury. "What worries me most is that 'THOUSAND'
contains the word 'THOU,' which occurs in nearly all our prayers, and
of course always refers to God. Using it now in the name of the year
will seem almost blasphemous, and is bound to cause terrible
confusion. Of course, we could always use Latin, but that might be
even worse -- The Latin word for 'Thousand' is 'Mille,' which is the
same as the Latin for ' mile.' We won't know whether we're talking
about time or distance!"

Stonemasons are already reported threatening to demand a proportional
pay increase for having to carve an extra numeral in all dates on
tomb-stones, cornerstones and monuments.

Together with its inevitable ripple effects, this alone could plunge
the whole medieval economy into chaos. A conference of clerics has
been called at Winchester to discuss the entire issue, but doomsayers
are convinced that the matter is now one of personal survival. Many
families, in expectation of the worst, are stocking up on holy water
and indulgences.

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