Adding feet, inches, and fractions

[d b]

I always entered the inches & fractions from the low-talent drawings in their decimal feet equivalences. Then calced what was needed. If it was necessary to the carpenters to give their info in feet/inch/fractions, I'd convert in my head. I started out by modifying an HP41 PPC rom program to only take eighths and only output hundredths, but that got to be rote fast.

The Spanish language part of your problem has another, better solution. Kyak and CheapOair find affordable tickets to Latin America. Go there in our winter when you're not working anyway, climb mountains, drink Pilsen and Cristal, float down the Amazon, don't hang around with gringos, fall in love with at least one woman who speaks slowly and clearly. When you come back you'll be able to talk the Espanglish they do on the construction sites. Don't ask me why no one knows the word for manhole and sidewalk is la forma masculina of steel. Don't ask anyone why all the El and La garbage. Everything must have a gender. Walls are female, ceilings are male. I don't know why. Caves are female, O.K. Hands are female too. Nails, towers, and bananas are male, and proud of it. At least that makes sense. Arguing with 5000 years of linguistic development gets one nowhere. Believe me.

The contractor's crew will love you and they pass around much better food at lunch that the engineers. BTW: rebar is Barre (bar-a). "Enferradura" gets you a blank look that needs no translation.

Addendum: do you ever break your 25 foot tenths-on-one-side/inches-on-the-other tape? I did regularly and i'd cut the remainder into 24 one foot pieces, then hand them out as "converters".