Metric is a fine system. It’s
logical, and even with my limited mathematical capabilities, I can multiply and
divide by 10 (at least on a reasonably good day). But it just isn’t human—it’s
mechanical: based on an iridium (?) bar in Paris. (This, by itself ought to make it
suspect. Would you base military standards around the world on the French
Army? I think not.) English measurements on the other hand are very human.
Inches feet and yards all have a rough relationship to human bodies—though I
admit I miss the cultural and mystical significance of
5280.
But I digress from the adventure I
planned to divulge.
Chris and I needed to put out a
limited number of brochures for the business—some people in South America don’t believe you’re “Real” unless you have
brochures—websites mean nothing to them. I quickly wrote and designed a couple
of brochures based on website information, and a few more addressing
specifically Latin American needs. Since we only needed limited quantities,
commercial 4 color two sided printing seemed a bit over the top—so we decided to
do it ourselves.
All we needed was a decent color
printer, which we have; a means to “fix” the ink on the paper, which we did with
a normal household clothes iron; and standard size A4 coated (shiny) white paper
(a bit longer and narrower than US letter-size), which became a nightmare.
No one we called seemed to have
two-sided glossy coated A4 sized paper! They had A4 shiny photographic
paper—1-side only, they had A4 regular paper, they had A4 colored paper, they
probably even had A4 crepe paper; but the paper we needed obviously did not
exist in this universe.
In desperation Chris visited a
bigger papelería (paper store). They didn’t have what we needed, nor did they
know anyone who did. What they did have was A3 two-sided glossy coated paper,
but that was way too big for our needs. Chris suggested they cut it in half for
us and he would bring it back and we would try to make it work—they told Chris
that was an odd request, but they would do it.
He returned with the paper and said
I should see how close it was to what I needed. I took one of the sheets he
brought and held it up next to a piece of A4 printer paper—low and behold they
were identical. We were dumbfounded.
I went online to check this out and
found out the A3 is exactly twice the size of A4, so to get A4 you simply cut A3
in half. Boy did I feel stupid; but relieved.
I guess I should have known, or
found out in advance, that A4 is 297mm x 210mm and that A3 is 297mm x 420mm.
This illustrates that metric is more than just a different system of
measuring—it also has spawned subsidiary measurement systems that apply to
specific uses such as we encountered with paper.
Another lesson learned. I am sure
this will not be the last.
If you care about metric paper
measurements, save this link: http://www.inkjetart.com/weight.html.
