Thanks @jshaffstall This solution worked beautifully. I am not sure how this drains resources since every call to the server now I am getting more info than I need. Probably its not a big deal, but obviously I know very little.
Other solution was to add the below two lines to my code after reading the excel file
df['jobDate'] = df['job date'].dt.date
del df['job date']
Thanks both for your time.