I recently read a long review of a fairly expensive CO2 laser engraving product. It was an import to the United States market. It actually is a quality product but the review was written by a curmudgeon who wanted to display he was a patriot. His “standards” bias disturbed me to the point that I need to make this comment.
First let me state I can hold my “patriot badge” as high as anyone. I earned it. But this isn’t about me. Maybe it is…
For the most part the reviewer gave the machine very high operational marks. His off base rambling were that both the machine and instructions weren’t “Americanized enough for the US market.” The problem was personal attitude, not machine function.
His biggest concern was the machine was designed in metric. He had to change a setting in the computer software to display inches. He stated it should have been delivered in inches for sale in the U.S. market. I wonder what rock he has been hiding under. In MY opinion the metric war was over decades ago. I must be the one with the errant thoughts.
He said the ruler inside the unit was of metric scale. OK, minus ½ point on that, but his comment was that anything imported to the US should be required to meet (his opinion) US standards. The ruler should have been inches. That rock is bigger than I thought.
Perhaps the poor fellow doesn’t get out much. I have used both sets of measurement for over 50 years. I find I can think in either “standard” and pick up the correct tool every time. The shop ruler I own has both scales. Even the electronic mail scale I just purchased will display ounces and grams. Is that “bad” or a negative or un-American? To me it is a feature.
In my opinion the mistake was made over 50 years ago when U.S. Citizens (including me, a grade school student) were encouraged to manually “convert” measurements between the two systems. No calculators then. That was a horrible mess. Obviously that pain is still felt buy some folks today. Computer chips have erased the need to manually convert when required. 10 cm is almost 4 inches. That is good enough for me. We could have been trained to recognize metric values and not convert them. That’s enough of my preaching.
His other review issue was the user manual. It must have had some of the language barrier reverse conversion polar logic. Writing good instructions is always a challenge. However, his big complaint was “it contains too much white space.” Huh? Say what?
“The white space should have been filled with more information on how to operate the machine.” What he was really asking for was a full training manual. I guess it is fair game to critique printing layout style in a review.
The final shot was for U.S. manufacturers to “watch out!” “The imports are here.” Well, at least one more person has left the shadow of the rock. Gosh, it really was a nice machine…