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.<\/p>\n
For the past 20 years or so, I’ve adapted – for the most part<\/em> – to the imperial system here in the US. I still feel more comfortable saying it’s 30 degrees Celsius than 86 Fahrenheit, however.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n I didn’t, and once I sent out that email, I received a very enthusiastic response:<\/p>\n “We’d like to offer $100 – is that ok?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n I had to deliver the disappointing news to my potential buyer.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n