How is this an American experience? Most countries use a different nomenclature to express their dates and times. Europeans traditionally like to put the day first then the month and then the year (D/M/Y)  Japanese prefer to put the year first, followed by the month, then the day (Y/M/D). Even our military culture won't get the repeat experience in the evening as they prefer the twenty four hour clock, and 21:10:11 just has no unique appeal.

The US is nearly alone in the world in using the M/D/Y notation and a 12 hour clock. Only Belize joins us in the use of M/D/Y although several countries support our idiosyncrasy by allowing M/D/Y as an alternate format. Across the world, by population, 63% enjoy the Y/M/D format, 31% like D/M/Y, and only a paltry 6% (that is the US and Belize) live by the M/D/Y approach.

The final word comes from ISO, the International Standards Organization (or International Organization for Standardization, s'il vous preferez), who brings you such fine things as the "metric system." Their standard, ISO 8601, published in 1988, and adopted by the European Union in 1992 as EN28601, calls for a date and time looking like this: 

the year is first, then the month, day, a"T" indicating that the time follows beginning with the hour (using a 24 hour clock) ,minute and second followed by the Z indicating the Zulu time zone, now called UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) which until 1972 was called Greenwich Mean Time, the time zone at longitude 0 degrees, the prime meridian. If you want to express time in a local zone you provide the offset from Zulu, thus my favorite Central Standard Time is minus 6, except during summer when we become minus five. The hyphens are optional, the T is not. Leading zeros are not suppressed.

This nicely sidesteps all sorts of complications.

In the computer world we routinely record time to the millisecond the standard allows this nicely with any number of decimal places for the units of time. Thus to be more precise, our experience tomorrow will occur at:  2014-12-13T09:10:11.000-06. I don't feel it!

I like my common 9:10:11 12/13/14 better.

There are still complications to be settled. UTC is not exactly the same as astronomical time which is known in the biz as UT1. Not wanting the "official" time to vary too much from the astronomical time, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures throws in a leap second to balance things out when needed. It varies but a second is needed typically every year to year and a half. Not highly publicized like those February 29'ths and even the "Fall back," "Spring forward" changes, the leap seconds filter through to your cable companies and smart phone networks and get absorbed without much notice.

The last leap second was added by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) June 30, 2012 at 23:59:59, so we are about due for another one. The earth's rotational speed is just irregular enough that the IERS publishes advance notice of leap seconds and here is what they said most recently: