The story about units at http://www.aoe.vt.edu/~cdhall/Space/archives/2003_09.html#000363 reminds me of a story told in the old CRRES readiness room.
Back in the 80’s, before Challenger, I was working as one of the readiness ops leads on CRRES (the Combined Release and Radiation Effects Satellite). CRRES had two tape recorders and when Ball Aerospace gave us the algorithm to calculate from telemetry where on the tape we were, the resulting units were in feet to beginning of the tape (BOT). We told them that we wanted time in seconds to the beginning of the tape, not feet. They replied with a new algorithm that gave us meters to BOT. Still no good for us and we asked again. Ball said that they would give us anything we wanted, as long as the calculation was a length, not time, and they couldn’t understand why we would want number of seconds to BOT anyway.
One of our guys sat down, did some calculating, and told them that we wanted the results of the algorithm to be in fathoms. Fathoms to BOT was close enough to a time to BOT that we could work with it. Ball Aerospace surrendered and finally gave us time to BOT that we wanted.
And then Challenger happened, we had to move to an Atlas booster, and we got a new computer system that could have done what we wanted despite Ball.
Stumble it!