It’s an extremely common task in software development to create routines that convert time spans to natural language representations, for instance 1000ms to “One Second”, 60000ms to “One Minute”, etc., as well as handling the singular/plural cases (”One minute”, “Two Minutes”).

Having been assigned that task more times than I care to count, it’s perhaps not surprising that it occurred to me that Microsoft has intentionally made a case for turning 1131984 hours (or 67919040 minutes) into days. I can imagine the developer thinking “okay… Well, we should put Days in ‘just in case’ but I doubt anyone will ever get a number *that* high”, and if he thought of weeks or months at all I’d be willing to bet that management would have decided that “47166 Days” sounds just a little less scary on a psychological level than “129 Years”.