Standards and Measures

I spend a lot of time wondering about little things, always have. Where they come from, who made them, why they are the way they are. I've been trying for years to envision a zipper factory, or the machine that makes twist-ties, or how long the original roll of toilet paper was before they cut it down to a usable size and how they perforate the sheets and prevent them from tearing. Have you ever seen a roll of toilet paper that had a perforation that was already torn, even a little? Some serious technology went into that. Everything we use, from plastic bottle caps to buttons to staples and the little tin pour spout on a container of salt, somebody made, somebody designed, somebody said, this is how it will be. Who are these people and how do I become one?
So here in Poland, I've been noticing some differences in the way things are, the little stuff that is so standard you don't really think about it until it changes or you're like me and hit your head a lot as a child. Beyond the obvious gap of standard vs. metric measurements (which let me here note that, while I'm personally a big fan of pints and tablespoons, gallons and quarts, miles, feet, inches and all our other absurd measures, not least for the fun and intriguing idioms and expressions we get from them--"Give him a centimeter and he'll take a kilometer" just doesn't have the same ring to it, the same for "The .45 kilograms of flesh which I demand of him/ Is dearly bought as mine, and I shall have it," -- but I hereby publicly cast my vote for the switch anyway. Other than our English friends, the rest of the world uses metric and it's just silly that we don't.) there are many other differences that are common and ordinary and pondering fodder for me.
Take pillows. I grew up, as most Americans did, with a decidedly rectangular pillow. Roughly twice as long as it was wide. When a pillow case was needed, we went to the store and chose from among assorted thread counts, colors, materials and patterns. But almost all the cases conformed to this basic size and shape. Of course there are other sizes and shapes, but generally speaking, we have rectangular pillows. Now, I haven't been all over Poland, nor have I conducted a survey, but the pillows I've slept on here have been almost square. Just the teensiest bit rectangular. And when I moved into my current apartment, I needed to buy a pillowcase, and discovered that the stores carried almost exclusively this size and shape, thus leading me to deduce that this was the standard. How did this come about? I realize how trivial a question this is in the grand scheme of things, but I can't help imagining the millions of pillows and pillow cases in this country, and thinking of how this general agreement was reached. Because pre-Industrial Revolution, most people must have made their own, so when cloth began to be manufactured, and sewing became industrialized, did the factories impose this standard upon the populace, or did they produce what they knew to be an existing preference? If the latter is true, then how, in a pre-industrial era, did everyone come to agree on this size and shape, and why is it different in the US?
Another example is paper. Our standard is the good old 8.5 x 11". Even has a nice rhythm when you say it. Eight-and-a-half-by-eleven. Almost all our forms and documents, all our schoolwork, copies, computer paper, flyers for garage bands, eviction notices and phone bills, everything is on 8.5 x 11" paper. Not here. Not sure what the precise measurement is but it's slightly larger. Not much, not especially noticeable at first, but then I tried to put some printouts I got into a folder I'd brought from home. A tight squeeze widthwise, and the tops sticking out. Paper brings us to holes: no sensible, evenly spaced three holes, often just a very flimsy-seeming two, close to the center, but sometimes an overwhelming and unnecessary five, and of course, you need binders to match. That is when you can find one, as many people use these folders with elastic bands that seem nifty at first, but are really kind of irritating. Who decided all this?
Eggs come in tens, not dozens. There isn't a door knob to be seen, as there is a definite predilection for L-shaped handles. The windows are cool: the standard is for these convenient hinges that allow you to let it swing in just a few inches from the top, or open fully from the side (not that my landlord sprung for those, but just about everyone else has them). Beer comes in half liters, no puny 12 ounce bottles here. Light switches tend to be those flat kind, no actual switch-switches. I won't go into sockets and power supply. I have to do a bit of searching to find notebooks (always small, no composition sizes) with lines instead of graphs, and it's impossible to get college-ruled. Books largely favor trade-editions; not much of a market, it seems, for mass-market.
None of this is truly in the nature of complaint; it's just these are the things I think about, especially at certain times--like when I forget and trudge up stairs to the third floor, following directions given to me by a native, and realize I'm only on the second and should've just taken the elevator. Who agrees with me on this one? The first floor you come to should be called the first floor and if I ever find a descendant of the guy who decided to start numbering European floors from zero, I'm going to smack him a good one.