A Month in the Life

Well it's a glorious (though cold) 29 February, and my last day of blogging. Anyone ever see a remake of the Pirates of Penzance? I vaguely recall seeing it in music class in 6th grade (or something like that), but the only detail that I remember involves the fact that Frederic was born on the 29th of February, but would not be released from his service until he reached his 21st birthday (which it turned out would last until he were 88--as 1900 was not a leap year). It always struck me as stupid, until I encountered something similar in real life.

I started driving when I was 15 (I believe I got my license on 28 Dec 1999), and I'm not sure of the details of my insurance plan (my dad pays for this--still), but my original insurance plan was set up to expire on the last day of my next birth month--29 February 2000. While this worked out fine, when I went to check my insurance card in March of 2001, I found that it had expired on "29 February 2001," hence the insurance company had forgotten to send a replacement, since its real expiration date never occurred. Of course, this was quickly resolved, and I received a temporary card, until the next one came, but it just struck me as a point of interest that their computers were smart enough to recognize 29 Feb 2000, but dumb enough to assign the renewal date as 29 Feb 2001.

You did know that Y2K really did happen, didn't you? On 29 Feb 2000, multitudes of workers were locked out of their buildings, servers crashed, but you didn't miss a beat, because this barely scratched the surface of the American economy.

Just watch out for 19 January 2038.