Plain English??

[WoodYouLike]

A few weeks ago our whole village received a letter from a electricity company (one responsible for the 'hardware').
In it they informed us that due to maintenance the electricity would be cut during the early part of one specific night.
Now, is it just me (and my English) or would more of you expect this night to have been Wednesday on Thursday if the letter says:

DECEMBER 15 from 23.59 til 03.00

Guess what happened
That 1 minute left on the 15th meant it was last night. If it had been me who had written this letter I definitely would have been more specific: night of 15 to 16 December between 23.59 15.12 till 03.00 16.12
Or is it just me

For us it wasn't that big a problem, but there live a lot of elderly people here, how confusing would this have been for them?

 

[joe-90]

If they'd made it 12.01 am it would have made more sense.

 

[bathroomswap]

Who's awake then ?

 

[WoodYouLike]

Old = insomnia?
Well, we were, last night. When it didn't happen on the night of Wednesday/Thursday we thought they had cancelled it. Mistake

 

[AdamW]

There are a surprising number of otherwise-intelligent people who think:

12pm is midnight
The new day starts at 1am.

Add to that the fact that a lot of people aren't too savvy with the 24-hour clock.

Really, to avoid confusion they should have scheduled the works for 1 am-4 am on the 16th of December. Then any confusion would have been avoided.

Also, I could be wrong, but when writing 24-hour times aren't you just meant to write 2359, or 0300 etc? Officially, I mean. Hence "fourteen-hundred hours" rather than "14 o'clock". Although you often see 24-hour clocks using separators (just look at your Windows clock now!)

 

[Moz]

WoodYouLike
is the village very big over 1000 houses ?

if not , they are required to knock an inform of disconnection/interruption of services
that is bylaw as the water board have the same bylaw.....

 

[empip]

.............. to have been Wednesday on Thursday

Oooh sexy days or double Dutch? Go for it Woody girl...

We'd all be pizzed if that seemed so.

 

[WoodYouLike]

WoodYouLike
is the village very big over 1000 houses ?

if not , they are required to knock an inform of disconnection/interruption of services
that is bylaw as the water board have the same bylaw.....

No, village is not that big (although growing) and we all received a letter three weeks before.

 

[kendor]

There are a surprising number of otherwise-intelligent people who think:

12pm is midnight
The new day starts at 1am.

Add to that the fact that a lot of people aren't too savvy with the 24-hour clock.

Really, to avoid confusion they should have scheduled the works for 1 am-4 am on the 16th of December. Then any confusion would have been avoided.

Also, I could be wrong, but when writing 24-hour times aren't you just meant to write 2359, or 0300 etc? Officially, I mean. Hence "fourteen-hundred hours" rather than "14 o'clock". Although you often see 24-hour clocks using separators (just look at your Windows clock now!)

strangely at work reference clocks on tapes will show times such as 25:30 or 26:00 still using the previous days date (ie the date before midnight).
the PC clock is showing a seperator :

 

[Steve]

Now this is confusing:

Where i work, we have 3 tills and a computer connected to a LAN which runs to head office over BT wires

Now, Each till runs a different time (all within a minute of each other) and the computer also has its own time. Then there's the LAN time. The clocks on the tills can't be changed manually. The clocks on the computers cant be changed manually (windows NT with stupid restrictions), only by head office.

Strangely, when the computer is making up automatic orders (EPOS system), the clock fluctuates wildly, sometimes showing 6:00pm at 9am etc. Orders generate at a set time, but which clock do they use . . . nobody knows because the clock displayed on the screen changes so often!

 

[WoodYouLike]

Another time confusing thing we noticed (and now have adjusted to ) is the following typical English swallowing of a perticular word):

half 9 here is half PAST 9 (09.30), but in The Netherlands half 9 = 08.30
Of course we learned this the hard way: showing up an hour early!

 

[empip]

ISO 8601 an international standard for date and time representations. Its full English title is Data elements and interchange formats -- Information interchange -- Representation of dates and times. The current version is the third edition, ISO 8601:2004, dated 2004-12-03. This replaces the ISO 8601:1988 first edition and the ISO 8601:2000 second edition.
ISO 8601uses the 24-hour clock system that is used by much of the world. The basic format is hhmmss and the extended format is hh:mm:ss. hh refers to an hour between 00 and 24. mm refers to a minute between 00 and 59. ss refers to a second between 00 and 60. Using 60 to represent the second is only used when a leap second is being added. So a time might appear as 13:47:30, or 134730.
It is also acceptable to omit elements to reduce precision. hh:mm, hhmm, and hh are all used.

 

[dg123]

Another time confusing thing we noticed (and now have adjusted to ) is the following typical English swallowing of a perticular word):

half 9 here is half PAST 9 (09.30), but in The Netherlands half 9 = 08.30
Of course we learned this the hard way: showing up an hour early!

It is the same in Germany as they say the hour minus the half. Our German friends were often there an hour before us, we just put this down to their efficiency!

 

[JohnD]

Plain English??

I'm English and I'm very plain.

I'm quite fat as well.

 

[WoodYouLike]

Picture, picture!

See Rogues