For more than 25 years I was raised, educated and trained to use the metric system, that French invention that uses meters, kilograms and the centigrade scale.
For the past 20 years or so, I’ve adapted – for the most part – to the imperial system here in the US. I still feel more comfortable saying it’s 30 degrees Celsius than 86 Fahrenheit, however.
I can’t recall when exactly it became second nature to flip dates and months, or to use a comma in place of a period and vice versa with numbers. But it took a while.
A recent domain inquiry from Europe reminded me how absurd it felt to read thousands separated by a comma instead of a period. In Europe, standard notation reserves the use of a comma for decimal numbers instead.
My potential buyer inquired about a single word .com that I would not price less than $50,000 dollars. I’m sure you see the problem already.
I didn’t, and once I sent out that email, I received a very enthusiastic response:
“We’d like to offer $100 – is that ok?”
Naturally, I smiled, realizing that my quote of fifty thousand US dollars was mistaken for fifty dollars and zero cents – arguably, a great deal for this 1996 gem.
But even with decimal notation and euros instead of dollars, Europeans place only two zeroes after the comma, so “50,00” would mean 50. Adding an extra zero when dealing with currencies is something only currency exchange offices quote.
I had to deliver the disappointing news to my potential buyer.
This time around, I explained that the quote was for “fifty thousand” – perhaps something I should have done from the beginning. Another alternative would have been to leave the comma out altogether, or adopt European notation for a second and send a “50.000” number out.
And this is another reason I don’t have set BINS to the domains that are for sale, as I don’t want to enter some misunderstandings all while the domain’s in Escrow.
I once received an inbound inquiry as follows…
Hola, Aceptaria $50.000 por el dominio… (Hi. Would you accept $50,000 for…)
That sounded exciting but since I do not get many five figure offer inquiries I was skeptical. I then realized the country of origin was Colombia so I asked if the offer was in US dollars. They did put a dollar sign in front of their inquiry. However, it turned out their offer was in Colombian pesos and the exchange rate at the time was about 1700 pesos to the dollar 🙂
Leonard – Too funny. Adding the currency, e.g. “USD” after the figure should help clarify a few things.
Last week, I went out to dinner and met a woman who’s making a documentary on the history of the (missing) metric system here in the USA. Bizarrely, given the amount of science done in this country, it has been more than 30 years since the United States officially looked into it.
Being on the same page with the rest of the planet has never been a priority for the USA. We began by cutting ourselves off from the Old World, and a sense of righteous exceptionalism has been with us ever since. Yet we kept all the weird measurements we inherited from the Old World while they innovated and left us in the dust!
Frankly, it’s odd. Thomas Jefferson saw to it that our money uses a decimal system: 10 pennies in a dime, 10 dimes in a dollar. At the time, that was unusual. At least we were progressive 200 years ago!
Way back in 1999 we lost a $125 million Mars Orbiter because half the team wasn’t using the metric system while the other half was. They messed up a unit conversion – a completely pointless problem. Yet even the waste of $125 million wasn’t enough to get congress to re-evaluate matters.
You see how hard it is going to be to switch people from .com 🙂
The states will never switch it is to much of a pain in the A–. It is ingrained.
DonnyM
@Donnie
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