on 30.11.2000 06.37, Fardig, Paul S. at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Dear Paul and All,
One of the most dramatic metric conversions I ever saw involved a hand-out
of metric tapes and rulers. It involved all of the gas fitters in the South
Eastern state of Victoria in Australia.
An event was planned to take place in Melbourne, the capital of Victoria, in
the mid 1970s. This event was advertised as a 'metric training program' and
gas workers were asked to bring all their old company issued tapes and
rulers with them to the training program.
The first activity of the training program was a ceremonial placing of all
the imperial tapes and rulers into trash cans, which were then removed from
the convention centre - and presumably from the lives of the gas fitters..
Following this, all workers were issued with all new, metric only, tapes and
rulers calibrated in millimetres. The rest of the single day's program
included talks on the advantages of SI and practical activities on metric
measurement and estimations using the new units. The activities were planned
to use the new measuring equipment as often as possible.
>From that day onward all the Gas Corporation's activities were conducted in
metric exclusively. Later estimates suggested that the most tardy of these
gas workers took less than a fortnight to adjust to the new regime and they
have successfully used the metric measures ever since.
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin CAMS
Geelong, Australia
> Our new (Federal) hospital currently under construction at Fort Defiance,
> Arizona, on the Navajo Indian Reservation, is essentially all metric! We
> are hosting a tour of the facility for the the Department of Interior,
> Planning, Design, Construction and Maintenance Council on Tuesday, December
> 12th. Care to join us Dennis?
>
> We've also given out metric-only tape measures to all employees at one of
> our Service Units in Arizona, upon request of the Service Unit Director,
> plus to all of our engineering staff throughout the state. We've had well
> over a thousand metric-only tapes (5 and 8 meter) made up with our Agency
> logo on them, and I've only got about 50 left. Time for another order!
>
> And I just got a call from the General Contractor for another of our new
> (Federal) hospitals, not yet under construction, in Winnebago, Nebraska,
> about how to meet our standard boilerplate requirement for metric training
> of all workers who will be on the job, which again is all metric.
>
> It's a big ocean, but every drop helps.
>
> Paul S. Fardig, P.E.
> Acting Director
> Division of Facilities Operations
> Indian Health Service
> U.S. Public Health Service
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dennis Brownridge [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Wednesday, November 29, 2000 1:04 PM
>
> 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.
>
