Dates - so important and still so so easy to get wrong. The wrong day with the right date, the right day with the wrong year; the list would go on and on if it wasn’t confined to a combination of day, date, month and year - the mathematicians amongst you making the quick jump to a possibility of 16 permutations of wrongness. Only yesterday yet another e-mail arrived about a comedy night with the date wrong; either the day or the date information, making the gig either last night or tonight depending which fact you decide is the correct one and discounting the other. In situations where you are compelled to go to something this adds the great news that you have an instant excuse that is unchallengeable. Unless of course that nemesis of the wrong date excuse arrives - the e-mail with the right information. This poisoned arrow is likely to appear somewhere between 1 and 24 hours after the original if the mistake has been noticed or pointed out - back in the dark days of office working I have been that fiend to make e-mail replies, short and ladled in sarcasm along the lines of:
Among peers at the time you could tell who was always on-line, or more likely with little to do, by how fast a reply about your mistake comes back; there was some short lived status to be had from pointing mistakes out to people you either disliked, were your senior or, joy of joys, people who’d done the same to you.
