One of those long term, never found wants, sometimes deserves a “Fuck, yes!” when you come across it. In my case, one of those is a ruler marked in centimeters and millimeters.
Rulers are a useful thing, whether for measuring small distances, drawing a straight line, or well, let’s just be honest: everyone whose ever had a yardstick has used it to retrieve something fallen in a tight space 😆. I have relatively few left, resulting in typically breaking out the tape measures; the youngest of which is my age. Thus, it’s in inches only. But there’s one thing that really irks me about tape measures: dealing with 1/16th inch as a unit size. It’s pretty great if you’re building a house, but not so much for random use. At least, not for me.
Enter the Midori multi-ruler! Given centimeters and a lack of ambiguity, it works well for my purposes, and I can appreciate that the first section includes half-millimeter marks. It’s probably the first new ruler I’ve had since grade school. The folding mechanism having 15° stepping would also have been great back when I lived in an age of paper.
Science fiction often leads to encountering a greater use of metric measures, which led me to learning the metric system as a child, because it was a bother to convert everything into our customary units. I’ve generally used metric units for distance since circa The Phantom Menace, mostly reserving inches and feet for when they are actually convenient. Which means, they’re either the relevant units or just unwieldy at that scale. E.g., a foot may be more convenient than a third of a meter (0.3m), or its irrational in yards (0.33y); you may or may not care about the difference between 30.48 (12″), 30 (11.81″), and 30.5 cm (between 12.00079″). By the time we reach the point where 1/16th inch or 0.0625″ is a unit size, we’re crossing the point to where I’d prefer millimeters as a unit of measure. I’m also not a fan of converting between fractions and decimal, which is mostly just noise.
Thus, my random splurge is a metric ruler. I am literally the only one in my entire family who has ever cared about the metric system, mostly owing to being a sci-fi nerd as a kid. Americans using metric units outside of science and engineering contexts is still rare, even decades later. But old habits die hard, and I’ve wanted one of years. Sometimes, you have to treat yourself with random shit :).