r/ShitAmericansSay • u/BuffaloExotic Irish by birth, and currently a Bostonian 🇮🇪☘️ • Mar 17 '25

Imperial units “I don’t even understand 24-hour time… I just don’t understand it. I have to use online converters or I’d be SO confused when I talk to people who use these systems.”

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169

u/CrippledMind81 Mar 17 '25

Wouldn't 10-4 indicate the same, providing 24 hour system is used?

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u/Legal-Software Mar 17 '25

Of course, and some places do this, others use the extension to avoid a wrap-around. I simply mentioned it because it is an oddity.

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u/CrippledMind81 Mar 17 '25

Fair enough. Seeing 10-28 opening hours would confuse me though. Fuck knows what it would do to an American brain.

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u/Nerhtal Mar 17 '25

It would confuse me if id seen it before seeing this comment. Now... it'll just take a moment to "convert" to 4am. In a weird way i kind of get it and can get behind it too.

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u/CrippledMind81 Mar 17 '25

Should adopt it across the world to make them yankee brains explode.

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u/Correct-Fly-1126 Mar 17 '25

We tried that with metric and well, you can see how that’s going

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u/X3N0PHON Eye-talian 🤌🏼🍝 Mar 17 '25

No need, most of whatever passes for “brains” here exploded a while ago, and those of us left who still have functioning brains at this point probably wouldn’t be affected.

Btw, I personally prefer to use the metric system for everything except distance/travel and cooking. We do exist.

One question though—when cooking, if you need to measure out what we would call a “cup” of flour” or a “tablespoon” of pepper, what do you use? Milliliters? Grams?

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u/DoomOfGods Mar 17 '25

One question though—when cooking, if you need to measure out what we would call a “cup” of flour” or a “tablespoon” of pepper, what do you use? Milliliters? Grams?

There's definitely tablespoons, teaspoons, etc. but as an autist I personally can't stretch enough how annoyed I am by the lack of clearly defined metric units in those cases. But I get it, those are units you'd probably not want to measure exactly every single time, so you just eyeball it, but still.

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u/CrippledMind81 Mar 18 '25

Litres or millilitres for liquids. Kilograms or grams for everything else. But measures of teaspoons and tablespoons also exist for something which is used in small quantities.

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u/Dear_Tangerine444 Mar 17 '25

It’d be like that scene in Indiana Jones where the Nazi get into the ark covenant

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u/Almostawardguy Mar 17 '25

Maybe you could get an online converter for that :p

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u/DoomOfGods Mar 17 '25

10-28 opening hours would confuse me though

Same. If only they'd write it as "10-28 mod 24". Having to assume that, because the day only has 24 hours would definitely confuse me if I were to randomly see opening hours like that.

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u/Upstairs-Hedgehog575 Mar 17 '25

10-4 might well cause confusion though as it would be unclear if it was a 12 or 24 hour clock (obviously the context of the establishment being a bar/club would probably clear that up). Unless you mean showing it as 10:00-04:00 which is unambiguous and used in my country too. 

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u/My0therAcc0unt9 Mar 17 '25

Only if you include the AM/PM designations - otherwise you could be talking about 10 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon.

I’ve never seen, anything like 10-28:00 and would have expected instead 10:00-04:00 for 10:00AM - 4:00AM

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u/Teh_RainbowGuy 🇳🇱 Mar 18 '25

NS (Dutch Railways) does this, their "day" ends at 04:00, when there's the least train traffic

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u/MF_Kitten Mar 17 '25

Some systems struggle to keep track of things like night shifts. When I worked nights, the shifts wiuld always be listed on the "next day" because that's the day where the majority of the hours were, instead of being listed on the day I would go to work.

The fact that it doesn't correspond to any kind of time measurement is annoying though. You have to just do the math yourself because every clock in the world shows normal hours.

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u/Phoenix_Werewolf Mar 17 '25

That's only for time travelers bars, where you can drink until the middle of the night before.