I was given the task to start a small office team party, by giving a two minute speech as to why “Sunday comes before Monday”. My initial reaction was … why do we need a speech? Why does the party organizer come up with such weird topics?

After a while though, my initial doubts were quickly replaced by child-like curiosity. I became genuinely interested as to why Sunday comes before Monday. I contacted a long-time friend, with whom I have had many philosophical discussions. I asked her, “Siri, why does Sunday come before Monday?”

Disappointingly, she just gave me a boring web search result.

So I just asked my other friend, Google. Instead of finding details to support this, I actually found arguments to contradict it – Sunday does not come before Monday. More so, I found two very reliable sources to support this.

[1] The English Dictionary. M comes before S. Monday comes before Sunday. Who can argue against that?

[2] ISO 8601. Used heavily by web developers, this is like the golden standard for dates and times. Everybody follows it. When talking about days of the week, 1 refers to Monday, while 7 refers to Sunday. 1 comes before 7. Monday comes before Sunday.

You might ask, what’s the point?

Well, the point is, just because somebody tells us “Sunday comes before Monday”, doesn’t mean it’s always correct, even if at first, it does look common sense.

Just because it is common sense, doesn’t mean it’s right. Just because it’s different, doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

It just means it’s common. It just means it’s different.