Who says Universities aren't forward thinking?

Our local hospitality operation has recently put in place an automated booking system, which allows grant holders to request and approve catering for meetings, etc. This is great, as it avoids (in principle) orders going missing, and so far it seems to have worked well.

Each request is assigned a "ticket number", and I noticed that the system designers appear to have learned the lessons of the Millennium Bug, and allowed plenty of room for new requests. The order I approved today, for example, is request number

REQ000000000721

which, assuming there were 720 previous requests since the system began, allows for 1,000,000,000,000 unique requests (that's a trillion).

Even if we assume a million requests a day, 365 days a year, we've still got over 2,700 years before the system runs out of space.

By which time we might have introduced some variety into the menu.