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Comment by RyanMcGreal | Hacker News Reader

I was in Value Village (a thrift store) a couple of years ago rummaging through their vinyl. I found a few albums and brought them to the checkout. The sixteen-year-old cashier looked at the records blankly for a moment and then consulted a note taped to the counter.

She looked back and forth a few times, and then asked me: "Um, are these seven in or twelve in?"

It was all I could do not to burst out laughing. "They're twelve in," I replied.

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Value Villages are predominately Canadian. It's possible that the records weren't the problem, but that the girl wasn't used to inches.

I beg to differ: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_Inches_of_Snow

I don't know anyone here that uses centimetres over inches. IT's what we're taught in school and used on legal documents but everyone I talk to always speaks in inches.

The only three things I hear referred to in inches are height, woodworking, and paper sizes. Everything else tends to be metric. (23, lived in BC/AB/SK/MB/PQ/NB, your experiences may vary.)

In my experience as a lifelong resident of the Centre Of The Universe (that would be Southern Ontario to non-Canadians), we buy butter by the pound, not by the 454-gram-package - no matter what it says on the wrapper.

Also on the cooking theme, oven temperatures are measured in Fahrenheit and recipe quantities are measured in cups, teaspoons and tablespoons.

For weather, summer temperatures are generally measured in Fahrenheit (because it's just not that impressive to say, "Man, it's 40 degrees out!") but winter temperatures are generally measured in Celsius (because it is impressive to say, "Man, it's minus 20 out!").

I'll concede defeat on this one. I've heard most of those examples but they never even occurred to me. Other than my grandparents generation, I _never_ hear temperatures in Farenheit. Weird.

No worries. Canada is nominally a metrickified country, but the enthusiasm kind of fell off somewhere in the 1980s, and we never progressed much beyond soft metric. That is to say, we still extensively use imperial denominations, but expressed in metric terms - like the 454 g bar of butter, or the 341 ml bottle of beer.

Other areas, like home construction, are still exclusively imperial. We use 8 foot 2-by-4 boards, not 2.4 m 5cm-by-10cm boards.

I'm older than 16, but clearly not old enough to get this joke

It took me a second too... I think she verbally said "12 in" not realizing that her bosses memo meant 12 inch? It would be pretty funny/silly in person.

Or, maybe the fact no one ever really identified them by inches, rather as "a 33" or "a 45"?

I doubt the cashier would have done much better with 33 and 45.

In the trade they're 7 inch and 12 inch, because many dance records are on 12 inch platter sizes but you play them at 45 (revolutions per minute on the turntable).

Protip: those dots you see around the edges of the turntable on DJ gear are not decorative; they're spaced so that one row seems to sit still (due to persistence of vision) depending on whether the platter is rotating at 33 or 45 rpm, and the degree to which the rows appear to slide past each other is a visual indicator of how much the record is sped up or slowed down by the pitch control, which usually allows a 10% variance (for mixing together tunes of different tempos).

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