So the other day, I was seeing a patient with my doctor. We were calculating the due date for our pregnant patient's baby and it came out to be October 31st. My doc absentmindedly said, "I wonder what day of the week that is?" To which I promptly responded, "It's a Wednesday." She gave me a quizzical look. I wasn't looking at my phone or a calendar. I could see it in her eyes, she made the call - I was no longer an idiot. I had been upgraded to idiot savant.
Now what I actually did was cheat. You see there's a system of knowing days of the week by knowing the date - you just need to know a single anchor day. Every year but leap year, that day is January 3rd. Since this year is a leap year, the day is the January 4th instead, which is a Wednesday this year. Now we need some other easy to remember reference points - 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10, 12/12, 7/11 and 11/7, 9/5 and 5/9. These dates all share the same day of the week as our anchor day. When my doc asked about October 31st, I just took 10/10, which I knew to be a Wednesday, and then moved forward 3 weeks, and voila! What if she had asked about August 10th? I take my reference point of 8/8 and move forward two days, and I know August 10th is a Friday.
Look, this doesn't come in handy all that often, but it sure is a fun way to convince people you are really smart. Or you can use it to convince people that Tom Cruise is your long lost brother and you should go to the casinos and play some blackjack.
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