Leap Year

How many days does a leap year has and how often does it occur?

I remember learning about this during my school days. Since then I don't recall a single instance where I forgot that "leap year has 366 days and it comes every 4 years".

It was time for me to train a new member in the team. We being in financial operations team and managing customer contracts, should be well versed in all these basic information. A bit of ignorance would cause nightmares to us. I was keen on training the person providing every small information. However, my style of training was to ask a lot of questions.

Here is the training scenario. We had a list of customer contracts to auto-renew effective 1st March 2007 for one year. As 2008 was a leap year, I explained we need to renew it until Feb 29th 2008.

I completed a few out of the list and trainee was pretty confident with how the process works.

As I said, I used to ask a lot of questions to make sure the trainee follows what I am doing. The next contract I was supposed to renew, the training session followed as below.

Me: What would be the end date of the renewed contract?"
Trainee: 28th Feb 2008.

Me: Why? Why not 29th Feb 2008? Isn't it a leap year?
Trainee: Leap year was only for the previous customer. This customer does not have leap year. (!!!)

I have shared this experience with few of friends and no one could stop themselves from laughing. Though this answer sounds funny, trust me I was appalled for that moment. Before even I burst out from anger, I straight away walked into the restroom and washed my face with cold water.