The church yesterday held a health screening where they checked our cholesterol, glucose, and other signs. After getting my blood glucose checked, I went to another station which had a digital scale (pèse-personne). I stepped on it and it showed my mass in pounds, which is meaningless to me, since I have always thought of it in kilograms since I was 36 kg when they introduced metric in school. The nurse then tried to divide by 2.2 in her head and got it wrong. I volunteered my calculator, which has the conversion built in; she entered the numbers and got 0, because it's reverse Polish, which she's unfamiliar with.
After everyone else had been weighed, I turned the scale over, flipped the switch, stepped on it, and read 56.8, which agrees with my mass measured at home, considering that I was wearing clothes. I know she is familiar with kilograms because (1) she's an immigrant; (2) I overheard her explaining to the previous patient that you divide your mass in kilograms by the square of your height in meters; and (3) I talked with her after flipping the switch. It appears that the immigrants try to conform to what they think is the way we do it. Is there any literature aimed at people who come here already knowing metric, but haven't lived through the introduction of metric in the 1970s, empowering them to push Americans to metricate? Pierre
