I've been searching high and low for metric federal construction projects
here in Arizona. We have two new high-profile federal buildings just
completed:  a visitor center at Grand Canyon National Park, and an ornate
federal courthouse in Phoenix that is being hyped as the most high-tech,
avant-garde courthouse in America. None of the publicity describing them in
great detail has any metric figures, or any that are soft conversions of
hard metric figures. I have personally measured the visitor center, tape in
hand (got a lot of funny looks!) and could not find any hard-metric
dimensions, even in non-modular things like sidewalks. I did find one small
Forest Service picnic-ground project which, if you looked very closely at a
reproduction of the original drawing, had dimensions in meters. But all the
signs describing the project were wombat, the modular buildings and
components were wombat, and the workers I saw were using wombat-only tapes.

I suspect there is no real metric building going on anywhere in the U.S.
(other than highways). I think the bureaucrats who claim otherwise have been
less than honest with us.

Reply via email to