Y1K
Posted by: tz8cy5 <tz8cy5@...>
Canterbury, England.
December 1, 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 is now, 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 music and all metrical
verse in which any data is mentioned? Every formulaic hymn, prayer,
and ceremony dealing with dated events will have to be re-written to
accommodate three extra syllables. All tabular chronologies with
three-space year columns, maintained for generations by scribes using
carefully hand-ruled lines on vellum sheeted scrolls, 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 may be called into question.
"We should have seen it coming," says Brother Cedric of St. Michael
Abbey, here in Caterbury. "What worries me most is that THOUSAND
contains the word THOU, which occurs in nearly all our prayers, and
of course always refers to a command give by God in the scriptures.
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 don't
know whether we are talking about time or distance!"
Stonemasons are already threatening to demand a proportional pay
increase for having to carve an extra numeral in all dates on
tombstones, cornerstones and monuments. Together with its
inevitable ripple effects, this alone could plunge the
hitherto-stable 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 Bibles.