Rockchimp69 said:
Can some American escapists tell me why you guys do the date like this : month/day/year
instead of in order like this: day/month/year?
(I would have just google'd this but its better to get a wider range of answers and I wouldn't know how to phrase the question)
Because it's more efficient for purposes of record keeping. There is no other reason. I think it's a matter of other nations simply not wanting to change tradition in favor of efficiency.
Having worked with reports, it's like this.
You assign a drawer or whatever to a given year, typically the one your in, and then arrange the files or paperwork by the date, with the month being the first number in the sequence. If you did it by day you'd be wondering "the day of which month". The year is the last number in the sequence because your typically arranging your paperwork into compartments that already mark the year ahead of time so it's the least relevent when your looking at the paperwork itself.
It allows someone to rapidly get to the right month, and then get to the proper day.
At least that's how I learned it, going back to like college.
Still I don't imagine this will change many people's minds. The whole European vs. American thing has been going on for so long, I doubt it's going to change now. Europeans accuse Americans of changing things just to be differant and assert some kind of pointless differance, Americans accuse Europeans of sticking to inefficient traditions for no other reason than that is how they have always done it, or not wanting to admit that someone came up with a better way. It's largely pointless. What's more as I've never dealt with paperwork in Europe or organized along those lines, I have no idea how their systems tend to be organized, for all I know it could work better, but it doesn't seem like changing the order of the numbers could be of any benefit at all to me at the moment.
