I don't purchase anything from one of my suppliers until the 13th of the month, otherwise I have to have a conversation about it at the end of the financial year, again.
Like quite a few Canadian problems this one is fairly blamed on the USA. Just convert to International Standards and perhaps we can be friends again? (Won't happen...🤣)
But it's frustrating when so much American culture/products have seeped into our everyday life here. I work in a Canadian hospital, but like half the patient charts are stored on Health Records systems from the States, which auto-print/save w American date formats. But you never know which half!
And I don't know what temperature it is because my Mitsubishi heat pump was designed for MAGA Americans and only offers Fahrenheit which was in the 1970s. It says a number and I say "Is that good?" What is that in real time?" etc.
International standard, which the Canadian government started advertising when I was in high school, is yyyy-mm-dd. Completely unambiguous. Wish more banks followed this standard!
I work in a hospital, where dates reeeally need to be unambiguous (both for scheduling appointments, but also for, like, knowing how recently someone had surgery, or when their medication runs out, etc). I have become a fanatical evangelist for yyyy-mm-dd.
When you save files yyyy-mm-dd on a computer, you can have every year for 1000 years in a directory, & they display in proper order old to new, without the slightest problem locating a specific file. I hate when you download credit card or mobile bills & they name them by month first.
It's also a pain when you pull them into excel and have to fiddle with them manually to account for some banks using the US format, some using the UK format and seemingly none using the Canadian format!
In computing, that is, in computer memory, the only format used is yyyy/mm/dd. This is the only format that allows transactions to be sorted by date. This format is what caused the Y2K bug: the date was stored in yy/mm/dd format in order to save 2 bytes, which was rare in that century.
Look carefully in Canadian documents... for days from 1-12, there's usually some reference right nearby with a date from days 13-31.
Yeah, *I* usually write an ISO standard date, but in Canada, I can't be sure anyone else does. Went to my 1 Mar dentist appointment on 3 Jan this year. Grrr.
I have shared this with no less than 20 of my American coworkers. People, this is why "r/ISO8601" is a thing on Reddit! It saves lives! Why are people not listening to me while I'm screeching!?!? ;)
Comments
* Don't do this. Stupid legacy code thing. Use the database appropriate DATE data type.
Cheers.
Yeah, *I* usually write an ISO standard date, but in Canada, I can't be sure anyone else does. Went to my 1 Mar dentist appointment on 3 Jan this year. Grrr.