My brain freeze

[AnubisOne]

I wasn't sure where to put this - I'm sorry if here's the wrong place. I've been known to be a bit of a ditz at times, but this one was rather embarrassing....

I recently had a customer ask me to convert a pound into grams, because she had a receipe that asked for a pound of some sort of food. I knew that a kilo converted in to 2.2 pounds, but couldn't for the life of me work out the conversion from there.

One of the other customers ended up piping up and saying she thought it was around 500 grams.

I asked my husband later and he reckoned it was around 410 grams. When I told him why I'd asked, he laughed.

[Rapscallion]

Psst - 454g.

Rapscallion

[Evil Queen]

Pssst; it's a cup.

[Pagan]

Pssst; it's a cup.

Huh? 454g is 16oz which is a pound. 8 oz is about 227g. (I can't get these damn conversions out of my head right now. Doug & Bill did a damn fine job of pounding them in.)

[AnubisOne]

Thanks all.

[SpyOne]

"A pint's a pound, the world around."
As for the rest of it, it makes little or no sense, because the French system actually does make sense, so in order to be different from the French ....

I'm reasonably facile with the metric system because I took a lot of science classes, but I still tend to default to "English" in my head: I know what 50lbs feels like when I lift it, I know what 6 feet is when I look at it, and I know a gallon when I see one.

My bicycle's tires are 700mm in diameter, which I think of as "almost the same as 27-inch wheels".

My best metric conversion story comes from the fact that I don't drink: My boss sent me to the liquer store to buy him a "fifth" of Jack Daniels.
I've seen old movies where people had a flask in their coat pocket, and I know those are a "fifth flask" because they will hold a "fifth". But none of the bottles I'm looking at are labled as a "fifth", and there isn't time to go back and ask him before the store closes, and I know if I get a bottle that is too small he'll be angry, and if I get one too big he'll be angry I spent too much money.

So I says to myself, "A 'fifth' has got to be one-fifth of something, but what? Probably of a gallon. Two pints to the quart, 4 quarts to the gallon, 128 ounces and one fifth of that would be ... 25.6 ounces. Only the quart bottles are labeled in ounces."
"Okay, a liter is slightly bigger than a quart, so there's nearly 4 liters in a gallon, so a fifth of a gallon should be around four-fifths of a liter which is 800ml. That bottle there is 750ml. I'll buy that one."

Military service is really good for teaching folks to do distances in metric. I've never met an ex-soldier who wasn't just as good at meters and "klicks" as I am with yards and miles.

[rvdammit]

Not forgetting some US measures are different from Imperial using the same names.

[JustADude]

My best metric conversion story comes from the fact that I don't drink: My boss sent me to the liquer store to buy him a "fifth" of Jack Daniels.

Me, I'd have just gone up to the clerk and asked "So, what size bottle would be a 'fifth'?" in my best please-forgive-me-for-being-an-idiot voice.

It usually works.