A.Word.A.Day -- AWADmail Issue 844

My shortest tenure on a job was 0.00417 of a mooch. When I was working my way through college, I applied for a job as a third-shift attendant at a full-service gas station (there was no self-service back then). When I reported to my first shift, the manager explained what was required. One requirement was that it was 8 hours a day, 7 days a week. That had not been explained during the recruitment. I resigned on the spot and was paid for one hour of work -- a huge $1.25.
-Chip Taylor (via website comments)

At a previous company, we had a new starter by the name of Jade Fenwick. After three hours of orientation, she left to go on her lunch break and never returned!
Coincidentally, that same week we were naming the firm’s three meeting rooms and we came up with The Helen Keller Meeting Room and The Florence Nightingale Meeting Room and were so captivated by our previous colleague’s endeavours that we named the third The Jade Fenwick Meeting Room, which could only be reserved/booked out for a maximum of three hours!
-Chris Pegg, York, UK (chris.pegg langleys.com)

I lived in Holland for two years during high school. One job that was available to students during spring break was to brush the sand off and peel off the outer skins of tulip bulbs. We got paid by the basketful. By the end of the day my fingers were sore and bleeding and I had barely filled one basket. I did not return, not even to be paid at the end of the week when I would have garnered ten American cents for my one day’s labor.
-Beverly Lyon, Grass Valley, California (bml mtnlyon.com)

I lasted .05 Scaramucci in a job I landed in a smelly tiny sleazy greasy spoon on a side street in midtown Manhattan in 1963. I was the “pearl diver”, the dishwasher, or rather the dish-rinser for loading into a quickie mechanical dishwasher. My station was less than miniscule, Turkish-bath sweltering, and mind-numbingly noisy (forgive the string of adverbs). I lasted one half day. Came in the next morning 10 minutes late and was fired. Best thing that ever happened to me. I went right to The Village and started singing nightly in “basket houses” (a term that I think has probably gone the way of the jernts) and never looked back.
-Charlie Cockey, Brno, Czech Republic (czechpointcharlie gmail.com)

I worked 1.2 scaramuccis as a hostess at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant back in 1970. I remember the afternoon when TWO busloads of kids showed up simultaneously to buy ice cream cones -- paid for individually with their nickels and dimes. “HoJo’s” then took pride in its menu offering 28 ice cream flavors (Baskin-Robbins was years in the future). I was up to my sticky elbows in those myriads of vats of ice cream, and I soon gave up trying to match ice cream scooped with requested flavors, much less trying to count all those coins. I quit at the end of my shift.
-Kerry Bryan, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (kerrylll verizon.net)

At age 16, I worked 0.4 mooches on my first adult job. Determined to show my parents I was responsible I found work through a newspaper ad. Using public transportation, at 6 a.m. I set out to conquer the world. I folded policemen onto their seat and placed them in an upside down toy car on an assembly line. After three days I took a day off to apply for a gofer job, returning Friday to find out my seat had been taken on the line. Luckily, a woman went to a wedding that day and I finished my first job testing the toy car tires on a ramp. 18 years later, after high school and college and other job adventures, I spent 684 mooches teaching.
-Danielle Austin, San Diego, California (danielle13 san.rr.com)

In my early 20s I worked one scaramouch as a hotel maid. It helped me realize that far too many people are absolute pigs when staying in hotels, and hardly anyone tips housekeepers. It influenced my many, many stays in hotel rooms over the past 40 years. I always tip at least $5 per night, and I take as much care to clean up after myself as I do at home -- where I also do not make the bed!
-Marty Born, Bethel, Alaska (marty.born gmail.com)

You asked about a measure of briefness coined after the example of Anthony Scaramucci. Here’s one from South Africa: “Weekend Special Des van Rooyen”. Van Rooyen was in office in arguably the most critical cabinet portfolio in South Africa from 10 to 13 December 2015 -- four days. And what a consequential four days it was! The currency plunged against most world currencies and the rapid change in Finance Ministers wiped untold billions in wealth from the country’s balance sheet. Cry, the beloved country, indeed...
Seems like Scaramucci lasted 2.5 times as long as our “Weekend Special”.
-Kobus Kruger, South Africa (kk.lists gmail.com)

I’d just like to say I spent 109 of the longest Scaramouches of life in the Army 50 years ago.
-Wes Reynolds, Croton, New York (wes rinsey.com)

A scaramouch is a very long time in politics. I present for the edification of A.Word.A.Day enthusiasts the meninga, a unit of time equal to about ten seconds.
-Harko Werkman, Hobart, Australia (wooddragons yahoo.com.au)

One toilet paper year: how long a roll lasts in your household.
-Margaret J. King, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (mjking9 comcast.net)

A dear friend measured much of life in Kevins -- her husband’s 6’ height.
-Liisa Beckman, Saint Anthony, Minnesota

The severity of a scientific blunder should be measured in milli-Midgleys. After developing CFCs, responsible for destruction of the ozone layer, Thomas Midgley went on to develop tetraethyl lead, a petrol additive, responsible for the destruction of children’s brain cells.
The unit of bad luck should be the Sullivan after Roy Sullivan, the only man to be struck by lightning seven times. Or, given that he survived all seven, maybe that should be good luck.
-Denis Toll, Aberdeen, Scotland (denis.toll outlook.com)

Benoit Mandelbrot was the mathematician best known for Mandelbrot sets. A friend of mine, who pioneered making fractals practical for computer graphics, told me that a nanobenoit was a unit of ego.
-Craig Good, Vallejo, California (clgood me.com)

A Trump: any amount of time that seems way longer than it is, due to how horrible an experience it is.
-Adam Gordon, Los Gatos, California (adam oyagroup.com)

When our kids were young when on a car trip they would always ask the question about when we were going to get there. Half an hour was an alien concept to them, but we came up a meaningful measurement. They used to watch a BBC claymation series called Pingu. The episodes were about 5 minutes long. So if we were 15 minutes away from our destination, we were 3 Pingus away. The kids could relate to that and were satisfied with the answer.
-Chris Hanley, Toronto, Canada (chrisjhanley hotmail.com)

I recall that when we needed to express some unit of time with our first child born in 1973, we found that using Scoobys as units of the time worked pretty well. One episode of the TV show Scooby Doo lasted a half hour. So when we could tell her that “We’ll be leaving for the store in two Scoobys”, she had a sense of how long that would be. It’s still a unit of time in our family.
-Art Roche, Dubuque, Iowa (rocheart3 msn.com)

A pompeo -- the amount of time it takes to fly to North Korea; achieve nothing except rejection, humiliation, and jet-lag; and fly back to the US.
-Edward Cooper, Carlsbad, California (via website comments)

From the IT world: The shortest time span known to man (this one, anyway): An onosecond: the time between hitting “enter” and wishing you hadn’t.
-Steve Swift, Alton, UK (steve.j.swift gmail.com)

I was on the admin staff of a struggling hospital. Our Chief Financial Officer was named John Martin; he was a very good CFO -- even had a sense of humor -- but he was always worried about cash flow, and he insisted on setting up an emergency cash reserve. So, the rest of us coined the term a martin which is a measurement of time -- an extremely short period of time: the martin -- the elapsed time between the establishment of a fund in case of emergency and the arrival of that emergency.
-Dick Adam, Berkeley, California (bhvnyd vom.com)

The emcee, one radian per second, a unit of rotation (including flipping). After Michael Cohen, former lawyer for Trump. Chose emcee rather than cohen as Cohen, from kohen, is a distinguished surname in the Jewish community, referencing persons in the priestly line of descent.
-Martin L. Buchanan, Laramie, Wyoming (martinlbuchanan gmail.com)

Tom & Ray Magliozzi, long time hosts of NPR’s Car Talk program, had fun with a measure of girth they named the Pinkwater. Children’s book author and former NPR Commentator Daniel Pinkwater is “rump challenged” (their words describing Mr. Pinkwater’s size). They wanted to describe the width of car seats in some number of Pinkwaters. Funny stuff as Mr. Pinkwater was egging them on through the process.
-Doug Wolfe, Morehead City, North Carolina (douglas.e.wolfe gmail.com)

My wife used to reckon units of weight in operatic tenor divisions: one Domingo plus 2/3 Carreras equals one Pavarotti. A hot-air balloon can lift seven Pavarottis, and so on.
-Ian Kearey, Brighton, UK (kearey54 icloud.com)

How about the famous unit of linear measure (famous among geeks, at least), the smoot, named for Oliver Smoot (MIT, class of 1962)? See here for details. The Harvard Bridge here in Boston-Cambridge is marked off (literally, in paint on the sidewalks) in smoots, each about 5’7” or 1.702 m. (Incongruously, the Harvard Bridge actually spans the Charles River at MIT and is miles from Harvard.)
-Alan Zaitchik, Boston, Massachusetts (alanzaitchik yahoo.com)

My youngest brother, Lee Meyer, is an architect. Once he was on a project site and wanted to do some measurements. To his chagrin he realized his faithful measuring tape was not in his pocket. Looking around, he found a small board at the site and decided it would be a meyer -- the measurement for the day. He brought the board back to the office and made the necessary calculations for the project. Since then, the meyer has become a relevant form of measurement -- but he also makes sure that he has a standard measuring tape in his pocket when he heads for a site visit.
-Lois Meyer Voeltz, Woodland Park, Colorado (colovoeltz gmail.com)

I’m sure you’ve heard of the Friedman Unit. It’s “six months from now”, when everything will be perfect. Friedman is a New York Times columnist who repeatedly said it after the Iraq invasion. “One Friedman Unit is equal to six months, specifically the ‘next six months’, a period repeatedly declared by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman to be the most critical of the then-ongoing Iraq War even though such pronouncements extended back over two and a half years.”
-Bill Young (billsplut gmail.com)

Per the wikipedia article you referenced:

Fame: Warhol
This is a unit of fame or hype, derived from Andy Warhol’s dictum “everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes”. It represents, naturally, fifteen minutes of fame. Some multiples are: 1 kilowarhol -- famous for 15,000 minutes, or 10.42 days. A sort of metric “nine-day wonder”.

So a Mooch would be about 960 Warhols.
-Martin L. Buchanan (martinlbuchanan gmail.com)