[USMA:29703] A tale by a colleague

[Han Maenen]

Last Friday, while having coffee during a pause, a colleague said he had been in Prague last year. He met someone from Britain there. This person asked my colleague's weight. He answered that it was 96 kg. The Briton 'did not understand' kilograms and that he should give his weight in stones and pounds. My colleague said that he did not understand stones, which of course was true. He did not learn that stuff at school, and Prague is deeply within metric system territory. That the Briton did not know (really?) about kilograms is one thing (just like young Britons a few years ago who thought that a sign in Belgium saying 'Breda 40' meant 'Breda 40 miles' -- probably 'educated' by The Sun), but when he expects metric using people in an metric country, to understand and use ifp, that is ^+%@&*+*&@$!!!!!!!! Giving in to such people is the worst thing a metric user can do. Why do persons like that travel to metric countries, one wonders? Maybe he was a member of the BWMA and the UKIP. What if one tells him bluntly: "I refuse to use your measuring units!" On the other hand, once I left Britain and there was a British truck driver, going to work in The Netherlands. He asked me a distance in kilometers from one to another Dutch city! I glady gave him the requested information.   Han Historian of Dutch Metrication, Nijmegen, The Netherlands