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Anyone who has worked the IT desk knows how users are. Reading is against their beliefs.
The possibility of servicing users that are american scares me…
Sounds like a decent job, you just have to recall them and the guys at the shop will fix the broken chip with the unit/date/time systems, the exceptionalism bug, the self-hurting capitalism apologetics defect, the…
Oh I see your point.
As someone who has raised tickets with IT desk, I’m pretty sure that’s true for them as well.
Me: Outlines extensive troubleshooting steps undertaken, starting with turning it off and on again, and ending with research that pins the problem down to a specific known platform issue with a clear fix.
Service desk, a week later: Have you tried turning it off and on again? Here’s a helpful KB article that tells you how to turn it off and on again. Thanks for contacting the service desk. This ticket is now closed. Have a wonderful day. 😇
I wish this wasn’t hitting the nail on the head.
My workplace uses VPN and ‘digital’ printers so you can just scan your badge at any printer to get your documents. Except, the network is basically held together with hopes and dreams so a common issue is network just won’t see the printer or lose the configuration and basic users can’t fix it. IT guys have sent me three different sets of instructions how to fix it, none of them work, and one of them got me flagged by offsite IT for trying to do something malicious. So now when anyone asks for help printing a document I just tell them to keep trying a different computer until they get one that works.
Been working IT at a public school for almost a year, have never once got an answer to the question “and what did the error message say?”
Got a ticket yesterday with the text “I can’t install addins in office anymore. I only get this message”
Then they attached an image of office telling them exactly why they can’t install addins (optional experiences is disabled) and exactly where to go in the settings to enable it again…
A friend asked for some computer help and when I asked him to replicate the problem, he closed the error window before I could read it. I think that was when I gave up helping people with their computer problems.
That’s when I tell them “Do it all over again, and this time don’t close the error message. I’ll be playing sudoku on my phone, call me when you have the error message for me.”
That time had passed by then. If I remember correctly, it ended up being a simple problem they could have solved themselves if they had read the message and understood the words.
I’m unofficial IT in my workplace cause our IT guys are corporate indoctrinated so just utterly incapable of communicating with other departments that aren’t front office of management. Assuming it’s not a network setting or printer screwing up, most of my IT assistance starts with ‘Read it back to me’ so I can see where they are at. Had one new girl, maybe 22ish, read the sentence to me three times before she even considered the thought she was doing something wrong.
yyyy-mm-dd supremacy
ISO 8601 FTW
Rather go with RFC 3339, a standard that is openly available for anyone to read.
I was going to write something sassy, but separating the date and time portion with a T is marginally superior. I love them both!
I know it violates all standards, but what works for me is 2025-09-02.13:32:56.25. I.e. using
.between date and time AND as fractional seconds.It’s pretty close to standard, doesn’t contain whitespace, and looks much nicer to me than having a
Tin the middle.Stop bike shedding. Use the standard.
than having a
Tin the middle.But then how will we know it’s a timestamp?
I haven’t ever had a date that was followed by a period and a decimal digit that wasn’t a timestamp, but if you do encounter (or can reasonably predict) that ambiguity, I defer to a standard format.
I find the
.significantly easier thatTto deal with when I’m looking across timestamped backups of config files or whatever. TheTreally throws me off as a “separator” character, it makes both the day and hour harder for me to read.
Hey man, try reading the words on the screen above the inputs.
You ever tried to do that AND be a redditor at the same time?
Tsk… these elitist lemmings… smh.
Normally they only read the titles anyway
“Date of birth:”
As a person who grew up in a country that does dates correctly, I have the opposite issue all the time
ISO 8601 supremacy.
YYYY/MM/DD
Hear me out
There are an infinite number of years*
So stating the year first brings you down from infinite to 356.25 days, on average.
If we then specify the month, we are down to 30** days
But if we instead specify the day. We get down to 12** days, instead!
TLDR: yyyy/dd/MM reduces our search space faster than yyyy/MM/dd.
However, it’s also stupid.
- true for our purposes, here ** ish
TLDR: yyyy/dd/MM reduces our search space faster than yyyy/MM/dd.
This fact makes makes me irrationally angry for some reason, and I blame you for making me think about it!
However, it’s also stupid.
Thank goodness for that!
I like my dates sorted by how likely it is that I need that information.
Most things I refer to by date happen in the current year and the current month. So using day first means in many cases I can stop right there.
If something’s not happening this month, then it’s likely to happen in the current year, thus month next. And only if that fails I need to put a year.
Following the same logic, you get the opposite for time:
Most things referred to by time happen sometime today but likely not within the same hour (otherwise I’d rather say “In 10 minutes”). And often the hour is precise enough and I don’t need minutes. So hour first.
If hours are not exact enough, minutes likely are, so minutes next. And only when that is not precise enough will I mention seconds or milliseconds.
This gives me a format of
dd.mm.yyyyandhh:mm:ss.msmsMany people have jobs that entail (essentially) fixing others’ mistakes. One doesn’t discard history at the start of each year.
Some people are just too enamoured by the yyyy mm dd format they just cannot see the pros of the dd mm yyyy system
If it’s for the front-end, you can represent it however you want. But yyyymmdd is the way to store it.
Because it’s not actually superior. You just haven’t dealt with hundreds of thousands (millions, billions) of timestamps in one table, for example
It doesn’t have to be superior in every case to fit some use cases better. They probably won’t ever need to work with hundreds of thousands of date stamps, so why should they select a date system based on that?
I would argue that it is superior once you have prefixed three files from two months with a date.
Oh yes because I look at millions of timestanps on a daily basis?
I never said the system you use is not better for certain use cases.
I just said that you are too into it to realise the dd mm system just works better for everyday life and common people.
One hundred twenty three (132). Middle endian. Love it.
But what happens when the year rolls over to five digits? Have you even thought about the Y10K problem?
There are some user interface experts who say that there is no such thing as a user error, only usability errors.
While no system is completely idiot-proof (especially for an idiot this clever), they still could have done a better job. It’s good that they highlight in red the non-conforming field, but the error message says “Please enter a valid date”, leading the user to conclude incorrectly that the date itself was a problem, not the “Month” field.
They also could have used the international standard format, YYYY-MM-DD.
User just can’t read, would have found a way to mess up any interface. YYYY-MM-DD would have probably been filled in 0005-16-99
While this problem is dumb, you could eliminate the class of user errors by having months be selected by name
Done…
New month names just dropped:
- Joctober
- Novemy
- Deculyary
- Febrarch
- Munepril
- Septanugust
Ah yes the month of febroctougust
Oh no
No Smarch?
Perfection
Technically, we can eliminate this class of user errors by holding up YYYY-MM-DD as the one true method of dating and smite the nonbelievers.
We’re generally not allowed to smite the end users at work, satisfying as that may have been.
We can mostly just hope to keep that standard within the codebase, and seek alternative means of eliminating error classes for end users
clearly its the month of SMARCH. or smapril.
Lousy Smarch weather…
Yeah what’s wrong with Smarch 5th?
People born in the first 12 days of any given month live happier.
better if month = day
But gets the date all wrong. Except for a subset of them…
Don’t worry, be happy.
I like that my day is past 12 because when I rattle off my 3 number birthday on the phone they never have to ask which number is which.
So this is why I’m so unhappy. Finally figured it out.
Who is creating a RuneScape account in 2022?
Someone born in 1999
How do kids born in 1999 know about Runescape?
RuneScape is still mega popular
In all fairness they’re creating an account for Runescape 3 so they’re probably not old enough to read yet. Perfect age for a disgusting amount of in-game microtransactions though!
Do you not have quattuordecember in your territory?
I wonder if anyone’s implemented a date entry form that changes by a regions default date format
Sure but I don’t think this ever caused an issue to anyone else…
The world could also agree to adopt the format used by most, which is YYYY/MM/DD; or the second most used one (DD/MM/YYYY) so that I won’t ever have to look at the american version ever again!
I believe it is YYYY-MM-DD actually.
I am not willing, not willing to biologically compute the distinction you imagine between ‘/‘ and ‘-‘ in this context…
Many countries use the dd/mm/yyyy format tho? Germany, Uk, Spain…
They do, I’m just pointing to an ISO standard which most use…
I’m pretty sure the opposite is true, someone has implemented a date entry to be always different than the default in user’s region
Microsoft is even worse, they do some places on region default, some places mm-dd-yyyy and some rare places in yyyy-mm-dd. I remember the worst example being powershell module for exchange server and message trace log. It’d output your region’s default, but accept as input only mm-dd-yyyy
It shouldn’t be that hard to switch the ordering of the input fields based on information like that gleaned from the browser.
uhh… it looks like he figured it out. Should we tell him, guys?
Yay OSRS!!!
I hold unequivocally that 2SEPT2025 is the best dating format: the units are in order from small to big, and the use of letters for month both break up the reading for a more concrete understanding and also make it unambiguous.
Edit: folks big on computerizing this shit. My bad. I find this to be optimal for human use.
Natural numbers work backwards, units are in order from big to small. That also does not store well on databases or Excel. You can’t sort it as text. YYYY-MM-DD-hh-mm
Actually, the date and time format is: yyyy-MM-dd-HH-mm. Always 12 characters, can be sorted as text or long (if the - is removed).
As long as it’s easy to manipulate at the back end. IBM DB2 date/time format uses 25 characters, and includes 6 decimal places for the seconds.
Or the DB2 date (only) format which is 7 characters: CYYMMDD
C = 1 if year is greater than 1999 as a “fix” for Y2K problems. 1250902 is today’s date. 250902 was exactly 100 years ago.Yeah, that’s what I’m dealing with these days…sigh. It won’t be a problem for a while. Hopefully the AI of the future is trained for the edge case.
Here’s atip that might help: Add 19,000,000 to any CYYMMDD date to convert it into YYYYMMDD
I will flex this knowledge at work. Thanks.
Cool. Now have it sort by date in a column with simple alphanumeric ordering.
Except for all the languages that might have a different spelling for the months…
Why is it important that they’re listed small to big? How does that help?
For the same reason it matters that we’ve agreed on a particular order to the alphabet.
Ok, but if you use YYYY-MM-DD, you can sort alphabetically, and it will also sort chronologically.
Even in human use, – in nearly any given scenario – I care about the month far beyond and above before I ever care about the day; just knowing the day, without knowing the month, is useless to me while I may want to know about the month regardless the day.
