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UPS Nightmare


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6 minutes ago, Clive Thorne said:

 

Ah - but does being a standard necessarily mean it makes sense ? Especially when the standards include multiple (and contradictory) options?🙂

 

 

Not always, but in this case I believe it's a good standard that would greatly reduce date-related confusion if everyone adopted it.

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On 9/17/2020 at 4:50 PM, alex_holden said:

 

Not always, but in this case I believe it's a good standard that would greatly reduce date-related confusion if everyone adopted it.

 

I've had a quick look at the link you gave and can't see an example of the MMDDYYY format that UPS seem to be using.

There are examples of the YYYYMMDD format, which I have no logical problem with........ But obviously the UK typical DDMMYYY is still the 'correct' one (Multiple smileys here)!!

 

I guess it's a Little Endian/Big Endian sort of thing.

 

As I say it was a quick look, so may have missed it.

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3 hours ago, Clive Thorne said:

 

I've had a quick look at the link you gave and can't see an example of the MMDDYYY format that UPS seem to be using.

There are examples of the YYYYMMDD format, which I have no logical problem with........ But obviously the UK typical DDMMYYY is still the 'correct' one (Multiple smileys here)!!

 

I guess it's a Little Endian/Big Endian sort of thing.

 

As I say it was a quick look, so may have missed it.

 

MM/DD/YYYY, as it appears in the log in the first post is (right or wrong), the standard American way of expressing dates. Before the turn of the millennium it was common to include only two characters for the year, but that’s frowned upon now.

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That is the reason I used YYYY/MM/DD when scripting at work. Easier to sort-by-date and find the newest or oldest occurances of whatever you're looking at. I still use yyyy/mm/dd today when saving receipts and such.

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10 hours ago, Clive Thorne said:

I've had a quick look at the link you gave and can't see an example of the MMDDYYY format that UPS seem to be using.

There are examples of the YYYYMMDD format, which I have no logical problem with........ But obviously the UK typical DDMMYYY is still the 'correct' one (Multiple smileys here)!!

 

I guess it's a Little Endian/Big Endian sort of thing.

 

As I say it was a quick look, so may have missed it.

 

@pentaprism said he prefers "YYYYMMDDHHMMSS", which you called, "the American way, which is obviously wrong." I replied that it is actually a variant of the International standard ISO 8601. UPS's format is the one that is confusing and ambiguous.

 

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11 hours ago, David Barnert said:

MM/DD/YYYY, as it appears in the log in the first post is (right or wrong), the standard American way of expressing dates. Before the turn of the millennium it was common to include only two characters for the year, but that’s frowned upon now.

 

9 hours ago, gcoover said:

The nice thing about YYYYMMDD is that in a spreadsheet or file listing everything can be easily sorted chronologically by year, whereas with MMDDYYYY everything sorts by month and the years are scrambled.

 

The American standard, of course, became so long before the invention of the personal computer, at a time when spreadsheet behavior was not a prevalent concern.

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14 hours ago, alex_holden said:

 

@pentaprism said he prefers "YYYYMMDDHHMMSS", which you called, "the American way, which is obviously wrong." I replied that it is actually a variant of the International standard ISO 8601. UPS's format is the one that is confusing and ambiguous.

 

Yes, I agree, which is what I thought I said in my first post. The "obviously wrong" should have had smileys by it - my intent was to  tease the Americans a bit., but it obviously got lost in the blunt instrument of text.

 

I can see the logical for YYYYMMDD as, as others have said, case a simple text sort will but it in chronolgical order.

 

Still doesn't make it right though (lots of smileys here again). Next thing you'll have me saying thing like "November Seven" (as heard in adverts for films)  instead of "Seventh of November".

 

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Next thing you'll have me saying thing like "November Seven" (as heard in adverts for films)  instead of "Seventh of November".

 

It's a slippery slope before you know it you will be talking not about London or Dublin but London, England and Dublin, Ireland 😉

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For what it's worth: I bought a concertina from a UK auction last week. For 35 GBP, UPS collected it on 17 Sept, protected/boxed it VERY well, and delivered it by courier to my home in Melbourne, Australia yesterday , 23 Sept. It was easy to track all the way through Denmark, France, Kentucky, Hawaii and Sydney via their app. I couldn't fault the service.

 

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