Conversion of units

At work recently I got into a little bit of trouble for mixing up my units. It caused me anxiety for about 20 mins but it got resolved immediately after. But that got me thinking about units a lot. Engineers have to be able to switch back and forth between units easily. In particular, like me, if you work for an MNC (and who isn't these days) you have to be able to switch between various systems of units. You have to know the values of various constants and material properties in these units. I'm getting quite good at it.

To add another wrinkle, I've spent a lot of my adult life in the US and now am living in India. So there are other units that come into picture as well. Like temperature. Till recently my weather add-on on Firefox was set to read temperature in F. Whenever someone tells me their weight in kgs, I mentally multiply by 2.2 for it to become a sensible number. Inches get multiplied by 25.4 to become mm. Distance is talked about in time, so that's not a problem as such. Like I said, I am getting good at it :)

But speaking of time, another situation I have to deal with is time zones. In addition to my friends who live there and whom I talk to regularly, we also have work meetings that need to be scheduled. This requires knowing the time in the US. Worst of all are the weekends in the fall - football. Life used to be so good in the US, every weekend during the daytime I'd watch College Football on Saturdays, NFL on Sundays. Monday mornings I'd read the analysis that would follow. Now the games start during my night. If there are any Longhorn or Colts games that start at 11:30pm IST (morning games in the US), I end up staying up for a few hours to follow the game online. If there are any games that are scheduled for the afternoon, I spend a restless night worrying about the results of the games and end up waking up really early to check the scores. For evening/night games (that start during the morning here) I end up staying at home for longer than is appropriate on a Monday morning. Worse, there's nothing to do during the weekends here and that just amplifies the knowledge that I'm losing out on all the fun of the Fall weekends.