The results of this study indicate that the month of September of the year 1994 is to be the time for the end of history.… Look, let’s put it this way. My wife came to me and said we needed new linoleum in the kitchen. I told her that we should hold off on the effort and the expense of doing it until October or November of 1994.

− The Reverend Harold Camping, in 1991

What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.

− Woody Allen

ONE

The Apocalypse has a way of fouling up one’s plans. To its credit, humanity has done its best to anticipate the End of Days, but lacking any basis for a reliable timetable, they’ve jumped the gun on more than a few occasions. The Apocalypse’s stubborn refusal to arrive on schedule has caused no end of trouble for the people who have volunteered to announce its arrival. Those waiting at the metaphorical arrival gate for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are forced to eat a lot of metaphorical crow. And pay for a lot of metaphorical flooring.

As you’ll recall from some of the early reports produced by our organization, Saint Clement I was one of the first to predict an imminent Apocalypse, around 90 A.D. He went around for several years telling the masses that the end was near. The masses responded by making him into a boat anchor. Once he was out of the way, they were free to replace their old linoleum.

A Roman priest and theologian once used the dimensions of Noah’s ark to predict that Christ would return in 500 A.D. When 500 ended with a whimper rather than a bang, he was forced to admit it was time to retile his foyer.

Later Christian scholars argued that Christ would wait for the odometer to flip before returning in glory. Nevermind that they were using the wrong year for Christ’s birth; if it were up to them, there would have been a massive run on flooring materials at the beginning of the second millennium. The Great Linoleum Shortage of 1001 A.D. was forestalled only by the near universal inability to read a calendar.

Pope Innocent III was convinced that the Apocalypse would arrive on the 666th anniversary of the birth of Islam. The Pope’s regard for Mohammed notwithstanding, the mountain failed to arrive. He gave in and replaced the wood flooring in the Vatican with ceramic tile.

In 1669, The Old Believers in Russia barely avoided an expensive flooring upgrade by immolating themselves. This was before the days of zero-interest financing.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses nearly single-handedly prompted the rationing of flooring materials at various points in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with Apocalypses scheduled for 1891, 1914, 1915, 1918, 1920, 1925, 1941, 1975 and 1994.