A trivial annoyance on dates

Working for a Contract Research Organisation, in a highly regulated environment can be challenging at times, but the big things are always good challenges to overcome, leaving plenty of room for the little things to really irk you into an un-justifiable rage of impotent moaning.

Today’s impotent moan: Date formats

Has my bloody antibody sodding well expired or not?!

Teeth are gnashed, hair is pulled,

‘Can I do the fecking experiment today or not? Has the bloody cock-weasel of an antibody expired?”

*breathes and attempts to regain composure*

Dates in my place of work are important things, if the reagent or drug is past it’s expiry date, we can’t use it, for good reasons.  True it’s probably fine, but that’s not good enough, why stick an expiry date on it unless it’s going to have “gone off”? No regulator would be happy with ‘yes, but it’d only been expired for a month or so…’ .

For most manufacturers, of reagents, stability testing isn’t really done, they just warm something up and cool it down a few times and see if it still sticks and proclaim that this should be enough to predict it will have expired in 6 months.  Rarely does any on-going testing really happen.

But this isn’t what’s annoying me, it’s the format.

We work with clients all over the world, and they tend to use different formats, not a problem as long as you know or as long as they’ve written it out ‘long form’.  The problem comes in when some thing may have expired on 12th of January, or will expire on the 1st of December. See figure 1 for how I see it.

Figure 1: Correct and incorrect stacking of dates

Please, every country on earth, write your dates as “12 Jan 11″, not 1/12/11 or 12/1/11…

Aaaand, breath…

G