So, You Think You Know What Day It Is

 Calendars are pretty self-explanatory. At a glance, you can see the layout of the weeks in any given month. Sunday starts each week and Saturday caps it. Need to know what date falls where? Just a glance will tell you. Or so I thought.

 One of the delights of our coming trip to Austria is a planned visit from my niece Jodi and her husband Calvin in early November. They live in Germany and it’s an easy long-weekend trip for them. We haven’t had the opportunity to visit in person for many years, so I’m really looking forward to their stay.

 Unlike us, Jodi and Calvin have been in Vienna before and have seen many of the sights. We wanted to do something that would be fresh and fun for everyone. Turns out they’d never seen the Lipizzaner stallions at the Spanish Riding School, so that’s what we chose for a Saturday excursion. Provided they were performing that weekend, of course.  

In 1963, a movie came out about the Lipizzaner horses: The Miracle of the White Stallions. It made a big impression on twelve-year-old me. The horses have lived and been trained in Vienna at the Spanish Riding School—named for the horses’ origins—since 1572.

A quick check of the SRS calendar last night confirmed that performances were planned for our weekend. Great! Some seats were already sold out, so I decided to buy the tickets right then. I opened an account and proceeded to ticketing.

 The ticketing calendar operates on point-and-click. I pointed at the Saturday box of our weekend and clicked. They made it easy. Pick your price level, select Best Seats, and the computer would assign you the best seats available in that section. Easy-peasy: click, click, click, and done. The receipt with printable tickets showed up momentarily in my email.

 That’s when the problem hit me. The tickets should have been for November 7th, but they were actually for November 8th. And Jodi and Calvin were leaving on the 8th.  Our tickets (non-refundable—aren’t they all these days?) were useless.

 Ever resourceful, I composed a polite but pleading letter to be allowed to change the tickets. I wrote it in English and then included a German version provided by Google Translate. Aware of the need for polite formality in Austrian culture, I made certain to follow all the polite conventions I was taught in grade school.

 I guess it worked. When I woke up this morning, I found their reply. After noting that I could not change the tickets or get a refund, they kindly allowed that they would make an exception this time if I paid a per-ticket penalty. Abashed but relieved, I readily agreed. Now I’m just waiting to get my refund voucher and buy new tickets.

 But how did this happen in the first place? It was late at night. Perhaps I was just tired and bleary-eyed. Or I got the wrong date in my head and screwed up. I went back to the SRS website and looked again. There was the Saturday box, just like before. Why did I get Sunday tickets?

 Suddenly I realized the problem: the calendar on the SRS website starts with Monday and ends with Sunday. Every calendar I use here starts on Sunday and ends on Saturday! My simple (or simple-minded) assumption that calendars work the same way everywhere had caused the whole problem.

 Turns out the European Union (and almost every other country) uses an international standard—ISO 8601—that we ignore in America. ISO 8601 designates Monday as the start of the week and Sunday as the end. As in so many things, the US goes its own way. It’s only costing me 40 euros to learn a lesson I should already know. Don’t assume anything, especially when you are working across cultures and countries.

 What uncomfortable lesson have you learned lately? Maybe we can learn from your experience!

 Ciao