Yardstick Catastrophe

The Yardstick Catastrophe, not to be confused with the meterstick debacle, had far reaching implications despite its relatively humble origins. It begins with a woman named Rini Tisquo—a teacher explaining the concept of distance and demonstrating with catastrophe’s namesake, a yardstick®.

She explained to her students that a yardstick® is made of 3 feet and each foot is made of 12 inches. Being still young and not yet having the curiosity and awe of life pounded out of them, one student asked, "what are the inches made out of?"

Rini, who had never contemplated such a question before, reasoned "Well, I suppose it's made out of 16 sixteenths of an inch."

"And what's a 16th of an inch made out of," inquired the same student.

To this Miss Tisquo could not respond; however, she could not stop thinking about the question and determined to find an answer—not only for her student but for herself as well. So she placed a call the Yardley Yardstick® Corporation and upon being connected to a representative she he asked, "what is a 16th of an inch?"

The representative—unphased by what he considered such a ridiculous question—responded, "Well, if you divide a yardstick® into 3 even parts, you get feet. If you divide a foot into 12 even parts, you get inches. And if you divide an inch into 16 even parts, then you get sixteenths of an inch."

The teacher was not happy with this explanation nor with the ever-so-subtle smug tone of voice the representative used, so she asked, "what's a yard then?"

"It's 3 feet."

"And what's a foot?"

"It's 12 inches."

"But what's an inch?"

By this time the representative was quite convinced he was dealing with the stupidest person on the planet so he began again—hoping that the circular logic that made so much sense to him would sink in this time: "Well, you take a yardstick®..."

Miss Tisquo, being all too familiar with the type of invalid reasoning she was about to receive, could not stand going around the argument again, so she hung up. Noticeably angered now, she phoned a reporter friend and related the story to her. Within the week the reporter came out with an article exposing the great secret of the Yardley Yardstick® Corporation: the only definition for the length of a yard was the length of their patented yardsticks®. The article also argued that their monopolization of the yardstick® market was based on the false premise that the length of their yards had some intrinsic meaning when in fact it was quite arbitrary.

This launched a government investigation that led to indictments of head executives of the corporation and a court order that the Yardley Yardstick® must be split in two. Furthermore, declared the court, in order to insure free market competition of the two, they must use two different lengths for their yards.

This stunning ruling negated the value of the Yardley Yardstick® patent and opened up the market to yardsticks of all kinds of shapes and sizes. Suddenly nobody could agree upon the length of anything and many violent arguments broke out across the land.

Soon people realized that without one standard, there was no sense in buying yardsticks. The yardstick companies panicked and attempted to use their political might to push through laws that would prevent the creation of yardstick 'copies' that the yardstick companies considered piracy. Despite their best efforts, yardsticks soon fell out of fashion. Of course with the fall of the yardstick, construction and various other industries suffered heavy losses due to the lack of a standard unit of length. The cumulative result of this financial devastation was a great economic depression—The Yardstick Catostrophe.

Interestingly enough, it was the same multitude of yardsticks that caused the depression that eventually ended it: during those desperate times riots were always breaking out and the government had to hire many policemen to help control the rioters. However, due to the lack of a standard length, they were unable to obtain enough sufficiently-sized billy clubs for all the members of the force. Fortuitously though, there was a large supply of variously sized yardsticks lying around so the clubless cops began using these to beat down the rioters.

Due to their poor construction, these yardsticks would usually break after being used on a single rioter, but since the infrastructure for their creation was already extant, they could be easily replaced. So, the old yardstick factories repackaged their product as "beating sticks" and were so successful in sales that the economy began moving again.

Shortly thereafter the policemen’s union demanded equal sized beating sticks for equal work and so the standard Yardley Yardstick was reintroduced as the unit of measure—this time having the justification of being just the right size to beat an average man unconscious