By Metric Madrid
12 new and different conversion stories
The following conversion story is reprinted by permission
My name is Scott Kahn and I grew up in a very anti-metric family. My father
always taught me the great tradition of the English customary units system for
measurements. I was told that if it was good enough for my forefathers than
it was good enough for us. There would be no talk of metricism around the dinner
table. In the seventies when they first started to introduce the two Liter bottles,
my father would have none of that and would rip off that portion of the label
before allowing it in our house. The seventies were a tumultuous time with the
government threat of everyone having to convert to this system by a certain
year. I fell into drug use and my life was spiraling down, then one day I noticed
that the whole drug trade was built around the metric system. Drugs were being
weighed in grams and kilos not ounces and pounds and I then realized that my
father was right about the evilness of the metric system if even the drug lords
were using it. It was bad enough that they had lowered the speed limit to 55
mph, now they wanted to give us the false sense of speed by saying it was 88.51
kilometers per hour.
I held onto my metric faith for awhile, but in my later high school years and
then into college I started to loose faith in the English customary units system
for measurements, yet I wasn’t moving towards metricism. I started to see all
the difficulties of doing conversions from one unit to another and that there
just wasn’t a consistent system for conversion volumes. After finding out about
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle where if you start to measure something really
small, that the act of measuring could affect the position of what you were
measuring so you could never know for certain the exact position of an electron
at any given time. I thought that if this was true in the micro world that it
was probably true in the macro world and I just fell into a very relativistic
view of measuring.
After college I worked as a carpet installer. Routinely we had to determine
the total square yards of carpet to use and I was amazed that this system always
worked. We would always have enough carpet to carpet the house. I started to
regain my trust in my father’s faith. This is when a decisive event happened
in my life. I met Ann who would be my future wife. We got along and agreed on
everything; everything except the standards for a measuring system. Yes she
was a cradle-metric born in raised in a household that use centimeters, meters,
centigrade and the whole lot. She was taught that the The International System
of Units was infallible when speaking on units of measurement. I tried to tell
her about all of the evil that the metric system had caused. One of the mars
landers was never to be heard from again because they had mixed English measurements
with metric measurements. I tried to tell her that it was an international conspiracy
to sell us more confusing rulers, thermometers and requiring us to have two
sets of wrenches to work on cars. She wouldn’t listen so I was bound in my conviction
to prove that metricism is a false system. But she wouldn’t give in inch in
fact she would only give 2.540 centimeters. She tried to get me to read books
like "English Unit Fundamentalism and Metrication" by Kilo Keating
but I refused to read books by these metric apologists, they just didn’t measure
up. I started reading all that I could on the metric system to be able to disprove
it and I found the readings of the metric fathers. These were a group of people
in 18th century France fed up with the lack of standards and difficulties of
converting and they wanted to build a system based on the decimal system. I
was surprised at the depth and ease of the system. You could actually do conversion
just by moving a decimal point. To make a long story short instead of converting
her, she converted me and I am deeply grateful for the truth and beauty of the
metric system. I now bow my intellect and will to the metric magisterium the
International System of Units.
