Burnaby49 wrote:SteveUK wrote:Surely you must know how many cubits are in a link though? Essential knowledge for life in the modern world!
What does it matter how much I know of Imperial Measure, it's never enough. You Brits can just keep battering me with more and more bizarre standards. How many feet in a chain? What could be more British than a chain, the distance between the two wickets on a cricket pitch? Doesn't mean you had to inflict it on the world by turning it into an official measure. Quarts, nautical miles, rods, long and short tons, fathoms, what the hell are they all? Roods? Who the hell knows what a rood is?
The most demented is the hundredweight. Logically you'd think it was a hundred of something. Not in Britain! In countries with any sense on how to measure things like Canada and the United States it's a hundred pounds. In Britain? Equal to eight stones. So a hundredweight is 112 pounds. Why call it a hundredweight? No wonder America revolted.
When I first left school at 16 I got a job on a building site as a chain-boy which is a posh name for a labourer who assists in setting out a site. That is you hold the other end of the chain / tape measure and bang the pegs in as well as make the tea, go for fish and chips, clean the office and perform the duties of a general dogsbody. Now... As it turned out I have a bit of a natural gift for using a theodolite and a level and being a naturally lazy man the site agent left me to get on with it ably assisted by my opposite number from phase 2 of the site.
The site was about 500m long with a separate 'team' starting from each end and, in theory, we'd meet in the middle and everything would be tikity-boo... In theory...
As it turned out my opposite number, Terry, had a nasty habit of mentally converting the metric measurements on the drawings into imperial measurements but he'd round things up or down to the nearest inch / foot / yard. so 1" = 25mm, 1 yard = 1metre and 1 chain = 20 metres. My actual, physical chain had a white paint mark 110mm from the end at 20m (or as near as made no difference) but his didn't.
Anyhoo... After about six months phase 1 and phase 2 actually started to meet and it soon became apparent that the connecting road was out by several metres and had a tree in the middle of it
If it weren't for the fact Terry and me knew about the bribes and corruption that were rife on the site we would've been sacked for that
We also built a bungalow back to front, a terrace that was 200mm wider at one end than the other, the leaning house of Gillingham and a house on somebody else's land but that wasn't entirely my fault.