In the recesses of the Roman section of the British Museum, a researcher recently found
a tattered parchment. Translated, it was a letter from Plutonius, "magister
factorium", or keeper of the calendar, to one Cassius, dated, oddly enough, 1BC,
January 19, or 2,000 years ago today:

Dear Cassius,

Are you still working on the Y zero K problem? The change from BC to AD is giving us a
lot of headaches and we haven’t much time left. I don’t know how people will cope with
working the wrong way around. Having been working happily downwards forever, now we have
to start thinking upwards. You would think that someone would have thought of it earlier
and not left it to us to sort it all out at the last minute.

I spoke to Caesar the other evening. He was livid that Julian hadn’t done something
about it when he was sorting out the calendar. We called in the consulting astrologers,
but they simply said that continuing downwards using minus BC won’t work. As usual they
charged a fortune for doing nothing useful.

As for myself, I just can’t see the sand in an hourglass flowing upwards.

Best regards,

Plutonius