Botched Valentine's Day plans

My St. Valentine’s Day plan was very simple, bordering on tiresomely unadventurous: design a greeting card in advance and email it a few days ahead.

The greeting ‘card’ was a MS Excel spreadsheet, with the general form of the contents as follows:

=if( today() >= B1, “Valentine’s Day greeting message”, “come back later”)

And the contents of cell B1 was the date 14 February 2009.

In plain language - if today is 14th February or later, show “Valentine’s Day greeting message”, otherwise show “come back later”.

The sheet was then protected and locked with a password to prevent the recipient from finding out the intended message ahead of time.


***

All this effort, however, was futile.

She changed her Windows date to 14th February, thus hoodwinking MS Excel and circumventing my carefully constructed mechanisms.