Some time ago, let’s say last August, I was called in to sign something at a doctors office. Next to the signature was a space for the date. I wrote 8/6/7 in the date space. The woman who gave me the paper looked at it and then said, ” I think you have to put 8/6/07.” I then asked, “Should I put 08/06/07 or 008/006/007 ?”
It will be nice when this decade is over and I will no longer face the persecution for not wanting to put a “0” in my abbreviation for the year. A person should be able to abbreviate a date as far as they can without confusing others. I saw an ad on TV the other day for the Olympics and it said to watch starting on 8/8/08. I thought, “What a shame. It would be cooler if they had 8/8/8.” My family had a reunion on July 7th last year and everyone kept saying that it was going to be on “seven, seven, o’seven”. I think by now it should be clear that I said, “seven, seven, seven”.
It is a strange phenomenon that people cannot mentally depart from placing 2 digits in the year column. Most of anyones life who lives in a single digit decade and lives longer than 20 years will be lived in years with double digit abbreviations and this leads to peoples inability to drop a digit for ten years. Most months are written numerically with one digit and people have no problem switching between one and 2 digits. Once we hit the year column people feel a need to use 2 spaces. In an effort to out-smart-alec me some of you may think, “What did you do in the year 2000?” Don’t be stupid, I used “0”, as I needed to denote the year.
In this decade I have not found another person who is taking part with me in this “Decade-Crusade”. I have found people who agree, but I have never found anyone else who marks the year column of dates without a leading “0”. I only have another year and a half before this issue is irrelevant for 90 years. I would like to find other individuals who feel as I do on the matter. If we can stand up and be counted I bet, ironically, we will still be in the single digits. So far the tally is “01”.