I have a problem with presumtion that the American way is always right. I work for a Norwegian Oil sector company, world wide buisness but mainly employing Europeans, work force over 3000. The Company has just taken over a small Houston based company, workforce 100.
Now to the nub of the issue, Dates, how did America come up with the Arse about face date form of Month-Day-Year when the rest of the world uses Day-Month-Year. My Company grown-ups have decided without consultation to adopt the American date system to avoid upsetting the 100 houston based employees.
I cannot help but feel that the European system, which is a natural progression from second-minute-hour-day etc is the more logical.
I am prepared to listen to arguments that support the benefits of the American system however, I beleive it would be far simpler for everyone if America enmass adopted the European system
Yes, it is annoying. I’m from here, and I prefer DD/MM/YYYY, but it just confuses people. When I have the choice, when I’m writing CGIs and such, I always use DD/Mon/YYYY notation. That way, it’s in the logical order and it can’t be confused for the merkin standard MM/DD/YY.
For those who are a bit dense:
DD/MM/YYYY is 13/5/2002 or 13/05/2002 if you’re a geek.
MM/DD/YY is 5/13/02, U.S. standard.
DD/Mon/YYYY is 13/May/2002.
I’ll personally make sure that the Americans conform to the European date system, ALL of them. The only thing you have to do for me is for your country to switch to metric.
I’ve taken to using the YYYY/MM/DD convention for all computer files. Frankly it makes much more sense and is sorted alphabetically correctly automatically (blimey that’s a lot of adverbs).
Failing that, DD/MM/YYYY always seemed to me to have more internal consistency. But I hear that Merkins would say “May 13th 2002” rather than “13th May 2002”, so that may explain things somewhat.
Now, back to the Monty day celebrations. Do we all need to become Mormons?
I like the american system better, but not for any real reason other than being used to it. It sounds like your real problem is with the idiotic Norwegian company that changed its entire system to accomodate a small number of employees. I simply cannot imagine any american getting particularly upset about changing the date format for business purposes(of course, these are texans we’re talking about). As others have said, if you work with computers, Americans don’t even use that format, we use YYYY/MM/DD.
Gee, I’ve always had delusions of grandeur. Now that there’s a calendrical position (more jokes, please; keep 'em rolling!) named after me, there’s no telling where this’ll end.
In all seriousness (yep, I know…too late), that should’ve read Month-Day-Year.
