20070401MetricYoga

So this weekend was spent a yoga retreat. Naturally, I wore metric t-shirts. As is common, the discussions around metrication in the US were positive with everyone saying things like "I wish we'd just change over" and passing on a few stories about things they'd been bitten by.

The first was a gentleman describing a business deal where a Belgian company had put out tenders and the choices came down to companies in the USA, Germany and Japan. The US company was cut out without further consideration when it was noticed that the measurements were in US customary units instead of metric. No consideration of anything else, if you're not using metric you may as well not submit a proposal. As a country, we lose lots of business due to not using world standards.

The second was a lady who'd been traveling overseas with her young daughter when she became sick. She was staying at a friends place who had the appropriate medicine but as can be expected from a place outside the US, all the measurements were in metric. Her daughter was very young so she had to do a calculation based on the mass of her child to work out how much to give but as she only knew her child's weight in pounds had to do a conversion to kilograms first. Unfortunately, she made a mistake in the conversion from pounds to kilograms and so gave the child too much medicine resulting in another medical problem to deal with. Luckily, her daughter wasn't seriously harmed.

So, here we have a company that lost a lot of money because they don't use standard measures (metric) and a senseless medical emergency due to a conversion error. How many people have to die and how much money do we have to lose as a country before we finish converting to metric? Obviously, these people have strong pro metric feelings now, but do we have to receive serious pain at an individual level before the rest of us see what's going on?