A weekly Friday task is to proofread an article listing the major forex-related events of the following week. The ones that include a change in month are the ones that require particular attention, and this one is no exception as it reads “Thursday – 31 June 2021.”
See the issue?
That’s right. June only has 30 days. This is one of the corrections that I send back, and the author is surprised that I caught it. After a moment of taking offence that she seems to think I don’t check every word, she mentions that she always forgets how many days the months have.
Naturally, this leads to me and the other native speaker in the room teaching her the Thirty Days Hath September ditty. (Yes, naturally. When was the last time YOU got to do this at work and it was actually entirely justified? All those naysayers who think forex is boring have obviously never been behind the scenes.)
We spend longer on it than we might have since, as we discover later, the age gap between the two of us means that SC* knows the traditional version and I know the alternative, and so the February part was even more confusing than it usually is. Good old February.
Title text: There’s a cool mental calculation hack I recently learned for this: If you open the calendar app on your phone or computer, the highest-numbered box along the bottom is equal to the number of days in the month! (Credit: XKCD)
Notes
* Colleagues will be referred to by their initials, partly for anonymity and partly because it helps me distance myself and feel less guilty writing about them.
Obviously when this is a published book the dates will be in chronological order, but until then they will probably mostly be random. I promise there is no ongoing storyline and this will not be confusing.
Lauren's Playground 