The obligatory first post

My shtick - I'm using RoR outside its normal use cases.
My most recent project involved a legacy MS Sql Server database. How legacy? The database I'm working with is used to store employee schedules and the date information is stored as a short date with two, four character char fields representing start and end times. A schedule running from 08:00 to 17:00 for the 1st of January is stored as:
date 2008/01/01
start 0800
end 1700
This (loopy) schema can't be changed because the original application is still in use. The request for the application I'm working on came from a committee; it isn't just legacy databases that I work with.