Calendar Fail

Thirty days hath September,
And all the rest, I can’t remember.

[Ancient English rhyme learnt by school-children everywhere.]

calendarfail

Our talented model Jesper is demonstrating how bad assumptions about calendar data can occasionally come back to bite you.

Important Note: Despite the logo on his sweater, there is no evidence to suggest that this is anything other than a cheap calendar bought at one of those carts in the mall.

So, on days one to three of this post, I will not be approving any comments that explain why this calendar page is fail. You are, however, encouraged to try and demonstrate how sad you are by trying to be the first to post an explanation – winners (and losers) will be revealed when I approve all (non-spammish) comments on Thursday. Bonus points to anyone who can explain rationally why the error might have occurred.

Published Mon, Mar 1 2010 8:19 by Alun Jones
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Comments

# re: Calendar Fail

31th of February?

Monday, March 01, 2010 10:53 AM by Goyo Redondo

# re: Calendar Fail

february 31 :D

Monday, March 01, 2010 11:39 AM by anonymous

# Repeating Fail

They printed the numbers of the days from the Feb calendar in March. I can tell this as I can see the numbers from Feb though the paper. It does look like they placed the small writing correctly as March 20th looks like it has the first day of spring on it. Also the other writing looks like Daylight Savings Time Begins and St.Patrick's Day.  I wonder if the next row has a Tuesday with no number and the writing Passover. The did not put February's writing as I see no Ground hog Day on the 2nd or President's day on the 15th.

Wednesday, March 03, 2010 10:40 AM by Steve B

# re: Calendar Fail

Because it claims that February had 31 days, not 28.  (Sunday was marked the 31st).

As to why, I guess the why is the assumption that since the previous month wasn't Sept, April, June or Nov. (which have 30 days) it automatically had 31 - forgetting about February being unique..

Thursday, March 04, 2010 12:45 PM by Chad

# re: Calendar Fail

As you've all guessed, the failure is in listing the last day of February as 31. It should be noted that the February page is correct.

As to why this happened, my best guess is that the calendar creator understood the old trick that, except in leap years, the first 28 days of March are the same as February (i.e. if the first of February is a Monday, then the first of March will also be a Monday).

That suggests that this calendar was created by hand, and the editor copied February's grid in order to make March, then added a few days to fill March out, but never revisited the first grid slot.

I used to really enjoy messing around with dates and times and anomalies related to them, so this just jumped out at me as "wrong". It's quite interesting that this popped up as Sony managed to kill everyone's Playstation 3 access to their network-stored resources as a result of a February 29 bug.

Thursday, March 04, 2010 5:19 PM by Alun Jones

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