Not a few of my tribulations in advancing my conceptual and procedural shop knowledge have arisen from the absurdly arcane systems of measurement used in metal fabrication in the United States. In this short chapter, I relate a bit of the history behind the arcane systems of drill-bit sizes, thread counts and pitch, pipe sizes and schedules, and metal gauges that we—like many shops in the United States—use at Howe’s. Even though these systems cause head scratching, they persist as the units by which tradespeople in the United States conceptualize space. The chapter ends by discussing the waste and errors generated by maintaining these systems rather than using metric like every other country except Myanmar and Liberia.