for us in Europe (rest of the world?) you insensitive clod.

But we'll be there in a month!

Although I'm biased, I've always thought it makes more sense to order dates with the more precise digit first. (DD/MM/YY).

For chronologically sorting dates represented as integers I guess YYYYMMDD would be handy.

Doctor who?

It's easy as pie:

Skinner: Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.
Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
Skinner: No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?
Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas!
Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.

http://www.snpp.com/episodes/5F22

Now there's a flaw in our economy that's waiting to be exploited. Handling fees that are higher than the amount received, effectively draining the company of cash.

It would also drain resources and create massive amounts of paperwork. Even though the process may be mostly automated I'd hate to revise those books, assuming enough people had done this.

Kind of like a distributed denial of service attack.

Of course it's easily remedied by blocking all cash transfers under a certain amount. I guess you're not obliged to accept money, but still it'd cause some extra work. Probably not enough to bring any given company down, but an interesting thought nonetheless.

No, you're using an integer.

Although I agree that the absurdness of the parrot being dead upon purchase is a valid point I like to think there is something more to it. It's also a great commentary on salesmanship and marketing. The amount of excuses and counter arguments the clerk comes up with really points out things that could be concieved as valuable sales traits in the context of todays capitalist world. Selling it as a 'Norwegian Blue' in the first place also supports this view.

Then again, I could just be a commie reading too much into it ;)

To the point of comparing it to the original joke, I'd say it's similar, but hardly plagiarism.