Be careful what you say, that’s a lesson a lot of people learn the hard way. Sometimes people might try to mess with you if you’re not careful with how you phrase your requests.

In today’s story, one person tells another person to measure something using “any” unit of measure.

Big mistake!

Let’s see what happened.

Any units

This one actually got done to me yesterday.

We had some material that I knew we were going to use more of than projected, so I told the person using it to “cut the lengths you actually need, and then measure the rest and let me know how much is left.”

He tried to make it easy on them.

Now, for various reasons, our system uses a wild mix of measurements.

There is almost no way to know in advance whether something like this will be measured in inches, feet, meters, or millimeters.

So, intending to save both of us some trouble, I told him “Any units are fine. I can convert them easily.”

He didn’t mean this type of measurement!

I realized what I’d said about 2 seconds later, and tried to clarify “Any normal units.”

So he brought me the measurement in Roman cubits.

And then, once we’d both had our laugh, gave me the sheet in millimeters that he’d converted from.

That’s funny! I’m surprised it wasn’t an even more creative unit of measure.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

Here’s another unusual unit of measure.

Definitely a missed opportunity!

I never heard of chicken power before.

That’s certainly an interesting unit of measure.

This student sounds pretty creative!

Who knew there were so many units of measure!

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.