How long is a piece of string ?

Waste not, want not. That seems to be the philosophy here. Well, pretty much. Sweden is a leader in sustainability and waste minimisation. That being said, I don't think I've ever seen so much packaging in my life. Mostly due to the IKEA principle. If you want to buy a nut and a bolt, you have to buy the nut first. Which comes in it's own plastic wrapper. Then you have to buy the bolt that goes with that nut. Again, in it's own packet. I'm all for freedom of choice, but sometimes a bit of common sense wouldn't go amiss. But I'm moving offtrack a bit here. Sweden is a metric system country. So you'll pretty much recognise things, unless you're from one of the few countries still working in feet and inches. However, Sweden being Sweden, they can't just leave well alone. Nope, they've found a unit of measure almost completely unused by the rest of the civilised world, and made it their own. The metric system consits of one, tens, hundreds, and thousands. And so forth. Most metric countries use primarily ones, hundreds and thousands, as the accepted units of measure. 1 millimetre, 500 millimetres, then back to 1 metre again. Sweden, on the other hand, has embraced the decimetre. Yup, such a thing does actually exist. Just nowhere else in the world. So, no 500 millimetres in Sweden, not even one 1/2 metre. In Sweden, we say "5 decimeter". The problem with this is, while it looks perfectly reasonable on paper, us new kids immediately lose a perspective of scale. We know in our mind what 500mm should roughly look like. But 5 decimeter ??? Will that fit through the door ? Who the hell knows. When the length get a bit longer, there's a new game to be played. It's called the "Swedish mil". A lot of people think that Swedes have no sense of humour. I think that the invention of the "mil" proves othewise. The word "mil" is one letter shy of being the English "mile", which is a bit more than one and a 1/2 kilometres. And it also refers to distances. So it would not be unreasonable to link the 2 and think that it's referring to the same distance. Of course, that would also be wrong. A Swedish "mil" is a distance of 10 metric kilometres. For some reason, you'll be struck by lightning and burn forever in hell if you refer to things in kilometres. Once you get past 4km, that is. 5 km is known as "1/2 mil", 10km as "1 mil", and so forth. As with the decimetre, us newbies immediately lose a sense of scale when trying to figure out how far away somewhere is in terms of "mil". 30mil sounds like a half hour trip, not a 3 hour trip. Cars being sold are advertised by the number of "mil" they have travelled, not by the number of km. A car that has travelled 200,000km has travelled just 20,000 mil. Sounds a lot better, doeesn't it. Now, don't go thinking that you've only got to avoid units of length. If only life were that simple. The same rule applies to weights. When buying, say, food, the norm for the rest of the metric world is to buy by the gram, or by the kilogram. Sweden has decided that the correct unit of weight shall be the "hekotgram", or 100 grams. Forget asking for 500 grams of mince. What you need is 5 hektograms. Like our newly acquired friend, the decimetre, the hektogram is a fair unit of measurement, and deserves recognition. But why the hell change what works perfectly well for a couple of billion other people ? If you can find the answer to that, maybe you can convince Sweden to get rid of the bloody "deciliter" also.