The Metric System

Folks at work know how much I hate the metric system. It's one of my pet peeves. Imperial measurements were just fine, weren't they? I mean, back in the day, there were things like bushels and feet and pounds and things like that. And these measurements arose from practical situations... a foot is more or less the size of your foot. Naturally people had different size feet, but at some point everyone got together and decided how big the "de facto" foot was going to be, and it was standardized. But things made sense if you knew the history. Then the French had to come along and ruin everything with the metric system. Give them credit: they did it before the industrial revolution came along, otherwise they'd never have gotten away with it. And nowadays, the "metric system" is really the International System of Units, but we still call it the metric system, and it's still derived from the meter. And do you know what a meter is? It's not the distance from a man's hand to his shoulder, or anything useful like that. A meter is defined as the distance traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second. If that's not enough, a second is defined as "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom at 0 °K".

The first question most people have is: why is this a big deal to you? Well, part of it is that we're defining standard in everyday use in a manner such that the average person could never understand them. But that's not my real problem. My problem is that everyone else in the world uses the metric system except the United States. Which means that every damned time I talk about how much someone weighs, or how fast I'm going, I have to convert the damned units in my head. Think about it... if I'm undercover in the Ukraine, and I start talking about feet and miles... isn't that a bit of a dead giveaway? And I'm not even that good at metric conversion. Targets aren't about fifty feet away, they're about sixteen meters away. Of course, no one would be as exact as to guess "about 16 meters", so after the conversion, I have to do another conversion. And forget about Fahrenheit and Celsius. I just say "hot" or "cold" now.

Give me an alias, and I have no trouble responding to it. Give me a backstory, and I have no problem making it my own. Give me a unit of measurement, and I'm completely lost.