You will get a smile out of this true-life story. Today as I walked through my company's mail room, I noticed the shipping clerk peering at a computer screen with the banner "Metric Conversion." I immediately stopped to watch her convert pounds to kilograms for some foreign destination. But no! She was converting pounds to ounces, and a web site was helping her do the math.
"If you just used kilograms," I pointed out, "you could do the math in your head."
