Lines of code... useful metric?

I'm often asked how many lines of code there are in some project I'm working on. I think it's the least useful metric of any codebase, but people always seem interested in knowing. I'm not sure if they are more impressed by a small number or a large number...

Since it comes up, here's a one liner to count the number of lines of code.

find . -name "*.cc" -or -name "*.hh" -exec wc -l "{}" ";" | gawk '{nlines = nlines + $1} END {print nlines}'