20070405Routers

Network Admin checks router configuration.

Network Admin: See, it sends me alerts at 97 degrees
Sysadmin: That's Celsius

While not the most economic way to get a feeling for Celsius, that administrator isn't going to be making that mistake again.

Another incident involved a server room heating up to 40 degrees. While those of us who know Celsius were freaking out and shutting down machines (the air conditioner had failed but our monitoring uses ambient room temperature to detect this), most of the people around us were sitting there scratching their heads and wondering what the fuss was about (the smarter ones used a calculator to translate it and then started helping).

I often get people asking me exactly how not using metric costs us over $1,000,000,000,000 (yes, that's trillion) per year. These are just a few of the many incidents that happen all over the country because, as a nation, we're not used to dealing with metric on a day to day basis and the errors in converting (or just not realizing what the number we're looking at means) add up quite quickly.

Let's stop wasting time and money and finish metrication!