Ha, ha!
I've been here in metric-land for 16 years now, and when I'm asked my height, I still (instinctively) say 5-10 and a half.
They look at me stupid
Still don't remember what that is in meters, 1.82 or something...
For some reason, I find weights easier to convert, I know I'm 79 kg and I've forgotten what I was in old money... stones & lbs.
There you go...
When working in civil engineering, in the U.K., all measurements after metrication were expressed in mm. Even a road width was expressed in mm, and despite the large number of digits in each number, it made good sense because there was never a doubt as to the unit.
Here in metric-land, the first thing I noticed on the drawings, were mixed units, some were in mm, others in cm and the longitudinal plans were in km with decimals of kms.
It's really odd, because it's all the same unit, depending on where you place the decimal point, but they seem determined to create problems from something so simple.
In the old days (and they weren't good) we were measuring steel reinforcement from bending schedules, in ft and ins. We then had to convert the measured length of the various diameters to weight, using a factor expressed in tons, cwt, qtrs and lbs/ yard, and then multiply that weight by a pricing rate expressed in £/s/d.
That was 1971 and we didn't even have calculators, let alone computers. All calcs were done by mental arithmetic or a slide rule, and we had literally tens of thousands of individual calculations to do.
Something like that is so easy now, length in m, weight factor kg/m and price rate €/kg and we have spreadsheets
Gotta laugh, or we'd cry ...
