Students panic over inability to correct the “six” when mistakenly writing 2016 instead of 2017

By Derek Baker, January 10 2017 —

Though many agree that 2016 was the shittiest year on record, the start of 2017 hasn’t gone that smoothly either.

Writing the previous year instead of the current on documents like cheques, exams and forms is a mistake many people make out of habit. However, one emotionally strained student emphasized his concern with miswriting this year in particular.

“Have you tried changing a six into a seven? It’s impossible,” third-year anthropology student Adam Andersen said.

Andersen then illustrated what the amalgamation of the six and seven looked like — a combination of something resembling an Egyptian hieroglyph and Enya’s made up language Loxian.

While feverishly writing out many sixes in a row and trying to come up with a technique to turn them into sevens, Andersen described how easy it was to correct this mistake last year.

“You see, when people would mistakenly write 2015 instead of 2016, the error could be simply solved by joining the bottom end of the 5 into the middle portion of the number,” Andersen said.

Andersen said that incorrectly written dates have already caused him many headaches.

“I think I may have written 2016 on the cheque to the electric company by accident,” Andersen said. “Now I’m literally living in the dark. So that’s great.”

Writing 2016 mistakenly instead of 2017 has also caused academic problems for Andersen.

“I’m pretty sure I’ve already failed my first midterm of the semester that I wrote on the second day of classes because I wrote the date wrong on the Scantron,” Andersen said. “I tried to erase it, but just got frustrated and ended up making large smudge marks across the sheet.”

Thankfully, the habit of writing 2016 instead of 2017 should be broken as the year progresses. By that time, Andersen also hopes to have recovered from failing this midterm by “just doing really well on the next one.”

“The only thing that is getting me through this year is knowing that in 2018, it will be so easy to turn a seven into an eight,” Andersen said. “Until then, I’ll still accidentally be writing 2016 until late October.”

This article is part of our humour section