KITCHENER – Local man Dalton Strickland, whose data entry job regularly requires him to read dates off a form and put them into a computer, literally never knows which date is the day and which is the month unless the day is above 12.
“Are we using the American MM-DD-YYYY system or the rest of the world’s DD-MM-YYYY system this week? Unless the day is the 13th or above I literally never know,” said Strickland. “Frankly I don’t think anyone in this country knows. We’re all just pretending.”
“If you think about it – Our inability to properly decide on a numerical dating system is a pretty apt allegory for our lack of a national identity,” he added.
When confronted with a date in the first third of a month Strickland uses several context clues to determine which system the person who wrote the date may be using, like whether they spell colour with a u or whether they still give temperatures in fahrenheit even though we moved off that like 40 years ago.
When that fails he simply gets irrationally angry at anyone who is born on the 12th of the month or earlier, and then closes his eyes and guesses which is the correct date.
“I don’t understand Dalton’s confusion,” said friend Marcus. “Everyone knows you put the day first.”
“What. No it’s month first,” responded his girlfriend Christine. The couple subsequently got in a huge fight and broke up, meaning their relationship only lasted from 10/01/2023-05/03/2024, with neither knowing if that is 6 months or over a year.
At press time Strickland had thrown his computer against the wall after being told that Canada technically has its own dating format: YYYY-MM-DD.
