Date:         Sun, 19 Dec 1999 00:22:45 -0600
Reply-To:     John Rodgers <inua@SCOTT.NET>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         John Rodgers <inua@SCOTT.NET>
Subject:      Re: metric vs. English
Comments: To: Mike Miller <mwm@LANSET.COM>
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Back in my airplane mechaniking days, I had an episode that really tore it. I
worked for an airline and was up on a scaffold  trying to get an ornery
inspection plate reinstalled on the tail of an airplane. Alignment of the bolt
holes was off just a hair, and I couldn't seem to get it there.
I was fussn' and cussn' and ripp'n and snort'n' when a redhead of the female
persuasion stuck her head out of the door at the rear of the fuselage and yelled
at me, "That thing is only one RCH shy of alignment, so why don't you just grab
your  BFH and smack it one time and get it done  so's I don't have to listen to
all that cuss'n'  and b**ch'n'"!

Nearly fell off the scaffold!!

John Rodgers
"88GL owner

Mike Miller wrote:

> Yeah, we used that measurement in surveys too...until female engineers
> started rotating through the survey crews.  Oh, well, probably a good thing.
> But we still used a euphonism [SP?] for a gad [steel device for starting or
> making a hole in hard ground so that a piece of wood could be driven in].
> Surveyors, however, have an excuse as they are the lowest form of life on
> the planet [or a highway construction job at least] outside of a water truck
> driver.
>
> Mike
> '85 Westy [longing for the bad old days, mainly cause they were my young
> days I suspect]
>
> > FWIW:  a human hair measures ~.003" in diameter - 3 one-thousandths of an
> > inch.  There exists a penultimate unit of measure that made it's way down
> > from NACA in the old days known as RCH - ostensibly the finest unit of
> > measure ever detected, but which I can't divulge in a public/family forum
> > (let yer polluted imaginations run wild,  & the context is that in the old
> > Apollo days it was definitely a man's world, that going into space
> business!).
> >
> > Austin