This message appeared in the mailbox:

The weekend at Milton Court saw 20 rampaging cows, storms, a burning car and a power failure. The results of the first should wash away in the rain, the second (the car belongs to the farmer who came to round up the cows) will be removed shortly from near the Mill House; and the power failure - most obviously affected the VOICE MAIL system and this will be re-set by engineers this morning. We apologise for the inconvenience.

As a result of an error on the main production database server at 5pm on Friday 25.02.2000 , data added or amended in applications have been marked with the wrong system creation date. The error has now been rectified and the majority of the data has been corrected.

-- Sir Richard (richard.dale@unum.co.uk), February 28, 2000