Report Offensive Message

It has nothing to do with how smart they are it has everything to do with the way that they were taught. The best practice is to know the audience for whom the output is meant. If you are the only one seeing it then format your date however you want; if it is meant for a manager born and raise in the US then you had better us the formatting that they are used to seeing. The same thing goes for people born and raised outside of the US.