Whatever happened to those really long spaghetti noodles? I thought it would be entertaining to cook up some long spaghetti and have a contest with my grandkids but it seems like they stopped carrying them in my local market all of a sudden. This is pretty much a rhetorical question because I have a pretty good idea who’s behind this … it’s the French. This has been brewing for a long time. It’s high time we get this out in the open.

George Washington and his Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson were looking at the metric system way back in 1790. There was a lot of politics over using the British Imperial System versus the newfangled metric system back then. The French helped us in the war but I guess it was easier to use what folks were already familiar with so the U.S. stuck with pounds and tons, inches and feet, and quarts and gallons.

Every once in a while I get a set of building plans that have been drafted using meters. Instead of building a security wall at 10 feet, it’s three meters, which is just under 10 feet. If someone gets those numbers reversed and builds a 10 meter wall, you end up with a wall almost 33 feet tall. You can see why I might have a concern. I even have a couple of metric/English tape measures in case an engineer from another country comes to a job site.

Nowadays most plans are on a computer and you just click a box and everything goes from one standard of measurement to another, but it’s a challenge if you’re in the field with a set of metric building plans. Even harder if you don’t have your smartphone loaded with the right applications.

So I mentioned that this all started back during the Revolutionary War days. When I was in high school, Congress passed the Metric Conversion Act and we were told we needed to learn liters, meters and kilograms in 10 years. Kids getting ready for college were hit like a ton of bricks.

I recently noticed a bottle of wine I have from Oregon is 750 milliliters, about 25 ounces. I’m not sure what it was before or when they made that change. Again, my guess would be that the French, German and all the other wines of the world put pressure on Napa Valley and Temecula and they decided to go along.

In the old days we used to work on our own cars under a shady tree. That’s how some of us became “shade-tree” mechanics. Some time in the ’80s, we started needing two sets of wrenches, an SAE and a metric set. American cars were half metric and half “American.” A lot of knuckles got scraped up over a decade or two.

Doctors and the medical industry made the switch to metric a long time ago. It is a more accurate system and science and medicine like to be really accurate. Construction will probably be the last industry to make the change. Guys that build things are very stiff-necked and proud. Not that doctors don’t have pride. But they do have drugs for stiff necks, which makes it easier to change, I would guess.

Since 1790, Congress has passed all kinds of laws about weights and measurements. It seems like they have been playing around with this issue for a long enough. Let me be the first construction guy to suggest that they get off the pot and make a darn decision.

By the way, I finally found some long spaghetti noodles. I didn’t take the time to measure them with my dual-system tape measure because I was in a hurry. For awhile, I felt like I was running around at 160.934 kilometers an hour.

The world has left the U.S. behind in the use of the metric system but I don’t think we really care. We’ll convert as soon as we feel like it. This is probably a touchy subject for some people. I’m not taking an official position on this one. I wouldn’t touch it with a 3.048 meter pole.

Have a home improvement or real estate question or comment? Send it to Matt Le Vesque at P.O. Box 1527, Highland, CA 92346 or czrmatt@yahoo.com and he will consider it for his column. Please include your full name and city of residence. Le Vesque is a general engineering/building contractor and Realtor in Redlands, CA.