In the 1980s the United States decided to join other industrialized countries in using the metric system. Some federal roads were marked in kilometers in addition to miles, drinks were bottled in liter bottles in place of ounces, auto makers started using metric bolts and nuts, engines were listed in cubic centimeters (cc's) instead of cubic inches as well as many other changes.

Protests and an outcry from the public caused the federal government to back off but it was too late and we still see many of the above changes. There was another change scheduled to be implemented during the year 2000, the metric time system. Government officials decided to put this on the back burner with a scheduled date of 2010. Being less than seven years away the government has begun a program to have the United States on the metric time system as other countries will be going to the same system.

Under the present system there are sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour and twenty- four hours in a day. The new metric time will have one hundred secoms (seconds) in a minuto (minute), one hundred minutos in an houris (hour) and, get this, 8.64 houris in a day. Figure it out - there are 86,400 seconds in a day and with metric time there will be 86,400 secoms in a day. So time won't change, only the way we record it. The number of days in a month and number of months in a year will not change.

It will be hard to remember secoms instead of seconds, minutos instead of minutes and houris instead of hours but that is the least of our problems. In 2008, manufacturers will begin making watches and clocks with the new faces and metric readings, but what do we do with our present time pieces. Jewelers will have replacement faces and numbers for analog time pieces but it will be impossible to convert digital pieces. Also impossible to change are clocks in televisions, microwave ovens and other appliances and devices.

The International Sports Association has stated they will convert all old sports records to metric time; thus, the four minute mile will become the two minutos and forty secoms mile. A college basketball game will be twenty-four minutos instead of forty minutes.

Professor VonDressen of the Berlin (Germany) Clock Museum said he will not change the faces of any of the museum's old clocks and he further stated no metric time piece will be allowed in the doors of the museum. He thinks the time change will be a disaster.

By far the worse problems will be with computers. Y2K (the advancement of time into year 2000) went smoothly and there were very few problems reported world wide. The change to metric time on January 1, 2010, will be a much worse problem. MicroSoft plans to offer free patches for their Window Operating Systems beginning in late 2008 and IBM is working on conversion programs for their corporate customers.

The federal government has kept the metric time system quiet but it will be forced on all of us. If you would like to protest please contact the Federal Metric Time Department, 2001 Federal Place NW, Washington, DC 20240.

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