The Metric System or Are We There yet and If Not, How Many Kilometers Until We Are?

Long ago, in 1878 in fact, the United States signed the Convention du Mètre, essentially saying the country would go metric. Long ago, in 1975 to be exact, the United States Congress passed the Metric Conversion Act putting the United States on a historical course correction towards the metric system. A journey that ended on the shoals of history 11 years later when Ronald Reagan dissolved the United States Metric Board.

In the 1970s, schools taught that we had to learn this metric stuff because the whole country would be using it shortly. Apparently, the people teaching that tripe were still high from their hippie days of the late 1960s. The Congress that passed the Conversion Act was obviously voted in by the same stoners.

In the 1970s, I recall visiting my relatives in Huntsville, Alabama and seeing speed-limit signs in both MPH and KPH. This was before speedometers had KPH on the display so some mental mathematical gymnastics were required to do the conversion. And there's the rub. No one wanted to think harder than they had to back then. We were still all very hung-over from the 60s. So we said, "Screw it," and ditched the metric crap.

I now make that experimental town my home. It is a place filled with military personnel, engineers, and honest-to-God rocket scientists, all who work daily in the metric system and we still can't get our metric shit together. We count our money in decimals. We use computers which are decidedly metric-from-the-ground-up devices. We speak in metric when we use mega or giga. We shop in metric when we buy things at 20% off. We even buy our soda in very metric, two-liter bottles. But we have a collective mental block against outwardly confessing to wanting the metric system.

I'll tell you a secret. The metric system is easy, but you have to think in it, not convert to it. Luckily, thinking in metric is easy, too.

Understandably, change is slow as evidenced by the adoption of decimal stock quotes by the New York Stock Exchange in 2001. After 208 years, those Wall Street pirates got tired of the whole "pieces of eight" thing. But what did we expect from the NYSE? It was founded by a bunch of guys who hung out in the park under a tree. Come on! They couldn't even find a bar to meet in? The point is, we tenaciously hang on to our traditions even when presented with something inherently better.

We all yearn for the metric system. We are just too embarrassed and lazy to do anything about it. Besides, we have a perfectly good system where something like the rod is defined as "the total length of the left feet of the first sixteen men to leave church on Sunday morning." (I'm not joking. Look it up. I'll wait.) Not having a rod or sixteen pious friends caused me to put my fence half a meter over my neighbor's property line.

The metric system is better, more natural, easier, but not perfect. Blind allegiance to decimal division lead to a squirrely electrical system for most of the world. While electricity flows naturally at 60 cycles per second, 60 isn't decimally enough for die-hard metric fanatics. These unbendable period pushers forced most of the world's electricity into a very unnatural 50 cycle per second grid and have been the bane of electronics-toting tourist ever since. But that shouldn't stop the US from joining the rest of the world.

So what is the point of this long-winded diatribe? Cheese. I bought cheese at the deli, a pound of cheese, to be exact. I normally buy half as much cheese as meat and it works out to balanced, sandwich perfection. My wife recently requested I buy ham for her. I got a pound of pastrami and a pound of ham and when asked, "Will there be anything else?" I naturally ordered a pound of Swiss cheese to balance out my two pounds of meat. The problem is, my wife wanted the ham for her salads and isn't eating the cheese. Now I have a very un-metrically measured butt-load of cheese in my refrigerator. Maybe kilograms wouldn't have saved me from my monumental cheese blunder, but running it off in kilometers is preferable to the 5,280 feet that make up those long miles.

Only Burma, Liberia, the United States and possibly some remote tribes in Papua New Guinea haven't adopted the metric system. So next time you wave your flag in the face of some poor, illiterate, third-world nation and start chanting "U-S-A", remember whose company we really keep. Besides, it's a fact that all the really good cheese comes from metric countries with metric cows.