Anticipation and disappointment, part 2

Since my initial similarly-titled post in October, I had a couple more months of similar disappointment before I could go ahead with actual fertility treatment - and then I had the anticipation of thinking it was actually successful for a couple of weeks before realizing that it was not. It's much harder to be let down after you think something was successful, than if it was obvious right away that it wasn't.

Date format confusion!

I was frustrated recently while using Quicken and realizing that I hate the date format dd/mm/yy(yy), as it has no correlation as to how we would generally read out a date in English (at least in this area of Canada) - which would be month-day-year. I realized I had the same frustration when I had to order new cheques last year because the banks had to conform and standardize to allow for electronic scanning/reading of cheques rather than manual - this meant I had to write the date in the dd/mm/yyyy format rather than freehand however I liked as before. My preference, actually, when writing a date shorthand is for yyyy/mm/dd, and I really hate it when only 2 digits are used for the year. The 2-digit year isn't so much a problem for current dates as you can usually figure it out, but when you're working with birthdates that could have a multitude of different years (particularly when I had a lot of patients who had birth-years in the range similar to the days of the month, ie. 1910-1930, it could get very confusing). It also seemed that the various electronic medical records programs I used (i.e., for clinic charts) or electronic health records systems (i.e., at a regional or provincial level) had differing date formats and I could never remember what order to enter a birthdate in when I was faced with __/__/__ . I had a receipt misread recently as well, where someone thought the receipt was for Feb 11 when it was actually for Nov 2 - probably of no consequence, but I prefer everything to match up so that my records all make sense.

So, I wondered, what exactly *is* the standard supposed to be in Canada for writing dates? Trust Wikipedia to have some information - and interestingly enough, it would appear that we in Canada are just generally confused when it comes to date formatting. While apparently most of the world uses dd/mm/yy(yy) as a standard (including Canada - presumably for financial/banking uses), mm/dd/yy(yy) is used in the United States, Phillippines - and Canada; and yyyy/mm/dd is apparently the ISO 8601 standard used in a number of countries - including Canada. They note that "All 3 main types are used in Canada- in French and in English", and I don't see any such similar notation for any other country.

So, my confusion and frustration is explained - presumably in other countries everyone just always writes the date in the same format so they have no issues. I'll continue to use yyyy/mm/dd or write it out longhand as I feel these are the least confusing to interpret. LOL.