Keys to Madness

This will primarily be of interest to other computer programmers, as I don't know many other people who make such heavy use of the non-letter keys festooned about the periphery of a standard computer keyboard. However, for a US-trained programmer making their living on Perl and shell command-lines, this was a startling adjustment:


If you don't see it, compare the location of the following symbols between your keyboard and the one shown above: |, \, @, ", #, etc. If it was just a case of learning a new arrangement, I could probably adjust, but since I brought my work laptop with me from the US, it would mean that they keys would move depending on whether I was docked or not -- clearly a recipe for confusion.

Fortunately, my new best-bud Brian of the IT department found an old US keyboard hiding on a shelf somewhere, and I was moving back at speed by the next morning. Still, it's something to be aware of when using other people's computers, public kiosks, etc.