The trouble with the Americans (or when 101 equals 11... or 110)

Now this might sound like it's going to be a controversial post but really it's just pointing out the repercussions of something that the Americans do with regards to dates.....

Being in IT, I work with dates a lot. I perform calculations on dates, I trigger events at certain times of day, month or year and I write the code that shows dates to users. In all these circumstances, I try to use a standardised date format for processing and then use a medium length date format for display purposes. That way, there is never any room for confusion. When processing dates internally, I use the format yyyymmdd (20090130 being today's date). When displaying that date to a user, I convert it into the following format dd mmm yyyy (30 Jan 2009). Either way you write the date, as long as you stick to the format, you won't have any problems...

Why am I writing about this you may ask. Well, today I received a notice from a large American organisation stating that my supscription to a service they provide had *expired*. I dutifully followed their instructions and visited their web site. I noticed that the expiry date on the site said 7/2/2009. So I figured the e-mail was a little early but as the subscription expired next week, I'd renew it anyway. I hit the renew tab only to find that the site was broken. The renew tab didn't work. No problem I thought, I'll phone their freephone number and renew over the phone.