Living In A Box

I was at the shops the other day picking up a copy of Dance Dance Revolution. For those of who haven’t experienced this, you get a large mat you put on the floor, stick a disc in to your Xbox and try to dance along with some europop, whilst the Xbox gives you a grade on how much of an idiot you look. I apparently look quite the idiot as you can see.. (outfit supplied by my new in-laws)

Anyway, whilst I was picking it up the girl at the till asked for my date of birth. Possibly just to have a bit of a laugh after I’d left at what a 33 year old man was going to do with a dance pad, or possibly to inform the sex offenders register of a new ‘at risk’ (thanks to Jon sending me a link you can visit this website and enter 07087 as our zip code to see all the 516 sex offenders in our area, and the two living on our street, as well as their addresses and convictions). Either way, I gave it as the second of the twelfth seventy three, which translates (wrongly) in to American as the 12th of February.

I’ve worked with computers on occasion in my past. Computers are for the most part American Citizens. Whilst you can tell them that they live in the UK, they may continue with their bad ways and sneakily keep dates in the US format. So everytime you want to show or save a date you have to ensure that it is correctly translated. I may not have actually gone to the effort of doing this properly everywhere, but I did have to at least think about it and that was annoying. So why do the US keep up with this silliness, maybe because 9/11 sounds better than 11/9 ? Or perhaps its just the British who persist with the entirely sensible day/month/year. A little research..

Well the US is in good company. These are the other countries that use the same format they do:

Phillipines
Federated States of Micronesia
Palau

And the rest of the world uses either ours or a few countries use the new Year, Month, Day standard that the Chinese like, which is ours but backward and so easy to understand without mistakes. I know I’ve moaned about going metric in the past, but just as an example these are the countries apart from the US that haven’t changed to metric yet:

Liberia
Myanmar

And then there’s paper sizes. A1 is twice the size of A2 is twice the size of A3 etc. In the US we have Letter, Legal, Tabloid, Elephant (seriously), Government-Letter which have absolutely no relation to each other. This paper standard is used by these countries:

Phillipines

And these are the countries that still use Farenheit:

None

I know all that is quite dull, but it sort of emphasises the point that this country appears to have absolutely no interest in what the rest of the world is up to. Its not just that those examples are out of kilter with everyone else, but that there are no plans whatsoever to change. I can’t seem to find any reasons why. Nor can I think of any way to bring this all back to my dancing prowess so I’ll just sort of stop.