An Article from a London Newspaper (circa 999 A.D.)

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 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 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 are 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 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 water and indulgences.