The night storeman in Haifa hands a radio to a driver ten minutes after midnight and types it in. In the morning the depot manager opens the driver’s card and reads yesterday’s date beside the radio. The activity log, two clicks away, says today. Neither screen is lying. The card asked the database for the day, and the database, which lives in a rack in Frankfurt and keeps the universal clock, answered that it was still the evening before. The log asked the browser, which knows where it is standing. Nobody will notice until someone asks why the driver was given a radio before his shift began.
Every team secretly runs three clocks. The server has one, and it is almost always the universal clock. The browser has one, set by whoever owns the laptop. The person has one, which is the clock of the place they are standing in. Most software never decides which of the three is the truth; it takes whichever is nearest to the line of code that happened to be written. A stamp written on the server says one day, a chart drawn in the browser cuts the weeks by another, and an e-mail composed by a scheduled job uses a third. The disagreements are small, an hour or two around midnight, and they land exactly where it hurts: the hand-out that happened “yesterday”, the week that starts a day early, the night shift whose work belongs to two different days. Even a person who knows about the three clocks does not always know which one wrote the line in front of them, because the line does not say.
Then there is the question of how to write the day once you know it. 3/10 is the third of October in Jerusalem, London and most of the world, and the tenth of March in Chicago. Both forms are correct and both are in daily use, and a team with one person from each tradition has a date that is wrong for somebody on every screen. A spreadsheet solves this by guessing per cell, which is how one column comes to hold two kinds of date without telling anyone. Neither 03/10 nor 10/03 is a matter of taste. It is the convention of a country, as settled as the side of the road people drive on, and a tool should know the convention of the country it is working in, not of the country it was written in. Whoever imports such a sheet into another system finds out only when half the dates move by months. It is nobody’s mistake; it is two traditions meeting in one column.
A day is a decision, not a measurement.
The way out has three parts, and none of them is clever. First, the workspace owns the clock. Not the server, not the browser, not the person: the organisation says where it is, once, and every day it writes — every hand-out, every receipt, every week in a chart, every morning e-mail — is cut by that clock. A manager who travels still sees the workspace’s day, because the record belongs to the workspace and not to the traveller. Second, the workspace owns the form, chosen once by its administrator, and every screen, export and e-mail writes it the same way. The form is never a personal preference, because a date written two ways in one meeting is a date nobody trusts. Third, the tool should know what a country usually writes and say so, so that the choice is a confirmation and not a research project. A workspace in Jerusalem is offered day, month, year and a 24-hour clock; one in Chicago, month, day, year and a 12-hour clock; and the administrator who wants something else keeps it. The rule looks obvious until you count how many tools break it.
Some forms step around the ambiguity altogether. A named month, “3 Oct”, cannot be misread in either tradition, and the year-first form sorts correctly in any list. A tool that offers the numeric forms and the named ones side by side, each written out as today’s date, lets the administrator see the choice instead of decoding it. A list sorted by a year-first date sorts itself; a list sorted by any other form needs the tool to know it is a date.
This is how GearLogs does it. Settings holds one Date and time card for the workspace administrator: the time zone, every zone listed with its offset and its city and searched by city, country or offset; the date format, ten forms, numeric and named, each shown with today’s date, the numeric ones with the countries that usually write them, the zone’s own form first; the clock, 24-hour, or 12-hour on English screens; and the day the week starts on. When the zone’s country usually writes differently from what is set, one sentence offers the three settings with a single Apply. Every screen, every export, every e-mail and the person’s own page on My Gear read the same four settings, and the day a hand-out is stored under is the workspace’s day, not the server’s.
The depot manager opens the driver’s card. The radio went out today, at ten past midnight, which is when it went out.
