We moved house recently, so we've started visiting a new veterinarian clinic for care of our feline family members. Prior to this week we'd only met one of the doctors and like her quite a lot.
This week we met the other one, and she's clearly very early in her career and hasn't quite leaned how to speak 'regular human' instead of 'doctor', but she did OK.
There was one funny/curious bit though. She wanted to see if our kitty had been losing weight, and had to compare the measurement they'd just taken (in pounds) to the last measurement from our previous doctor (in kilograms).
When she opened the older records, she said "oh they measure weight in 'kigs'", pronouncing the abbreviation for kilograms as if it was a word missing a vowel. She then said she would do the conversion to see if the cat's weight had increased or decreased, but warned us that the "percentage is usually higher when it is calculated using kigs" because "the kigs unit doesn't have as much accuracy". I was really speechless at this point, there wasn't any way I could understand how someone who graduated veterinary school within the last decade couldn't already be familiar with kilograms and basic unit conversion mathematics.
The only way I can think that she could draw this conclusion is that the medical records typically list weight measurements with two significant digits after the decimal point, and one hundredth of a pound (.01) is certainly less weight than a decagram (.01 kilogram), so a two-significant-digit measurement in pounds can be more precise than a similar measurement in kilograms. This has nothing to do with accuracy of course, but it's pretty common to confuse precision and accuracy.
Still... "kigs"? I wonder if she pronounces lbs as "lubs"?
Kevin P. Fleming
npub1ca…2209l
2026-06-14 18:25:38 UTC
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2026-06-14 18:25:38 UTCEvent JSON
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