A lesson about dates...again

I know that while the US uses month/day/year for dates that Europe and most of the rest of the world use day/month/year, but I still get tripped up by it regularly.

When we took our exploratory trip to The Netherlands last September I pre-ordered a T-Mobile SIM card so that we'd have cell service from the moment we arrived at the airport (really helpful to have Google Maps working correctly when arriving at an unfamiliar place).  Unfortunately, I thought of it just a bit too late, and it arrived in our mailbox in Connecticut the day after we arrived in Amsterdam.

When I got home I looked at the expiration date on the card '01.11.2022'.  Bummer...  It expires on January 11th, so we can't even use it on our next trip in June.  I looked at this date multiple times, listed the card on eBay hoping someone else would be able to use it.  Sold it, but not until February, so I cancelled the sale because I again looked at the date on the card and realized that it had already expired.

Only after the buyer of my cancelled eBay sale reached out to me, and I was relaying to him about the expiration date, did I realize that 01.11 is November 1st!  I fished the SIM card out of my trashcan (fortunately in my office so there's nothing yucky in there) and mailed it to him at no charge.  It would have gone to the dump anyway so it was no loss to me.

I really wish we could get the whole world to just standardize on proper ISO 8601 dates to eliminate this confusion for everyone (and get filenames that sort properly to boot).

Lessons learned in this adventure:

• Again, remember, EU dates: day/month/year 🤦‍♂️
• If you're in the US and making a trip to Europe, Windbel is one of the few places that will ship Dutch SIM cards to the US.  Just make sure you order WELL in advance of your trip.  It took a bit over 2 weeks to get to me.
• Learned from my eBay buyer: If you're travelling to Germany, German SIM cards are notoriously difficult to activate.  There's no cell roaming throughout the EU.  So the trick is to get a Dutch SIM card.  You can activate it in Germany and not have to struggle with the German SIM.