One of the things that I still struggle with is the dependence, here, upon an exact and incredibly flawed method of accounting for dates. They insist that dates must be written in an mm/dd/yy fashion.

This is, for an old-school computer geek, somewhat challenging. Let’s say that we need to account for the third of February, 2004 (yes, past; follow along).

According to that standard, it would be written as

2/3/4

Why? Because if the mask was MM/DD/YY, then it would be

02/03/04

In the military, we had a slightly different written date style:

DDMonYY

Where that same day referenced above would be written as

03FEB04

God help you if you’re accustomed to a Day, Month, Year order. In any case, there would need to be a customary or even tribal knowledge of how dates are used and referred to.

When I wrote code and scripts for automation, I always ordered in Year-Month-Day because it was easier to quickly sort and scan through the lists.

Thank The Maker that the 2000’s — or, the naughties — are far into our pasts.