Looks like language was key to the story...

One of the first things I did when i was told to bring order in the chaos that was Europe at my company at the time was to mandate that "All servers shall have only one keyboard layout and it shall be US International" and the French resisted least and the Germans with their QWERTZ resisted most...

Oh, and having the system wide language setting to "English" as well. Helps with getting helped, most documentation is _not_ in whatever your (continental European) local gargling language is...

ok, same for Welsh, Gaelic, Icelandic, Faroese, and....

hm, maybe list those who do not have the problem: so "a problem except for people livin in the UK (not the Welsh speaking), Ireland, the USA, Australia, Canada (except for Quebec and the French communities outside of Quebec)..." YOU GET THE POINT, DO YOU?!

Oh the joys of server consoles presented in Finnish and Hungarian.

I always managed but my biggest headache was SQL database collation 25+ European offices. I really tried but in the end had to just pick one (UK English) and mandated "live with it".

"All servers shall have only one keyboard layout and it shall be US International"

The problem with that is the enter key is horrible and also with US English locales you also get dates the wrong way around, temperatures in Farenheit etc. Using British or Irish settings would make much more sense in Europe...

That still won't get you proper ISO 8601 dates, though. I'd even call British 30/6/2023 type dates more wrong-way-around than American 6/30/2023, which is just more jumbled up; 30/6/2023 is the exact opposite order (assuming you weren't expecting digit-by-digit reflexion), and the worst for sorting.

[1]https://xkcd.com/1179/

[1] https://xkcd.com/1179/

Keyboard layout has nothing whatsoever to do with locale settings, not in Windows, Linux, Mac, or any other system I know of. You can have the layout that matches whatever your keyboard is while all of the proper settings for date, time, spelling, system language, etc are as you expect.

"All servers shall have only one keyboard layout and it shall be US International"

Is this the physical keyboard or the keyboard layout setting? The real pain comes with an bootable USB drive when they differ, especially when the WiFi passphrase contains at least one of those characters that gets relocated.

Or, you could accept that your company operates internationally, with different languages and therefore different end user needs...

Of course the French and Germans resisted.

I insist to have my Windows version using the Etruscean language as a default, and I won't change my mind!

Many years ago I went to Paris on a day trip, largely to deliver a "second-hand" laptop - quite why I don't know, laptops weren't cheap back then but was it truly better I flew over there than use a courier or purchase one in France? I suspect corporate budgets were involved!

Before I went I had a call* from one of my colleagues, "Can you bring me a wateefee?" After a bit of toing and froing I established that what he actually wanted was a copy of What HiFi magazine!

So I fly to Paris with the laptop and wateefee, link up with a colleague and get to the office then hand things over. First comment, "Oh, it's the wrong keyboard!" What did they expect on a UK sourced machine?

It ended up being a rather wasted day, albeit with a decent lunch in the middle, compounded by flight delays at CDG. A plane had gone U/S so they combined two flights but wouldn't let anyone leave the grotty concrete Eurohub as they wanted to get everyone boarded as soon as possible. Friends were, "Oh Paris, how glamorous!" Business travel is always a PITA.

*In the days before ubiquitous email people did actually phone each other!

Friends were, "Oh Paris, how glamorous!"

Been there, done that.

Three days training in a hotel in Cap d'Ail (literally, cross the road and you were in Monaco), out of season.

Spent a day either side sitting in airports for the only connection of the day.

At least the weather was clement, but that was the only positive.

I had a trip to Brussels a few years ago, again a nice city to visit. We basically spent all the time in a grotty business park near the airport...

The hotel only had a poor selection of the good stuff :-( -->

I had a trip to Brussels a few years ago and the day after the trip was a public holiday back home. My boss was agreeable to booking a later return flight, so I managed to actually see some of the sights, in particular the Atomium. If only it didn't require such a coincidence for business travel to be pleasant.

Had something similar in the early 2000s.

Sent to a conference of the company's IT security people across Europe.

Five days in Cannes. Sounds glamorous, doesn't it?

Except that it was in January. And the conference rooms were subterranean.

If we hadn't have made an effort to go out at lunchtime we would not have seen daylight for the five days.

Hey, they were just trying to make you feel at home! We all know that IT folk work/live in the basement, have an aversion to going outside, and lets face it coming from the UK, it's not like sunlight is a daily commodity.

Your French hosts put in that little bit of extra effort for you! And here you are disparaging them, shame on you....

CDG was really awful, like a run down 60's post-apocolyptic film set. Jeez those crappy orange plastic chairs and concrete columns repurposed from some multi-storey car park.

Only time I was at CDG was a flight from a working trip to Naples (equally grotty if you spend all your time in a big factory) and the flight was grounded due to storms over the UK airport. Eventually diverted to Heathrow, car parked at Gatwick (or maybe t'other way about but client who'd booked flight was in Crawley). Come to think of it, the outbound flight was delayed because of a leaking fuel filler cap. Air travel!!!

Stopped flying on business now but, when I did, I always insisted on using Schiphol as my European hub - even from the UK it was local airport to Schiphol for an onward connection. Avoid CDG and Heathwick...

I'm all for poking fun at the French, specifically because at those being super-proud of their highly elaborated language. But in all fairness, me trying my best French sounds much worse to a francophone person than any wateefee or appi* in our ears.

appi as in "I am very appi" (happy)

Worked with a dev who was a real Francophile. He changed his (Windows) input locale to French so that he could simulate an AZERTY keyboard with a (physical) QWERTY keyboard. It caused no end of confusion when we were helping him out. Worst part was he commented his code in French!

Ca c'est dégoûtant !

Can we have a Béret & Baguette icon ?

This will have to do >

> Can we have a Béret & Baguette icon ?

Well, as we're not allowed Paris any more this should happen...

Having been introduced to keyboards while working in France I love my azerty, though I am bilingual and can use a qwerty. Living now in the UK my laptop is qwerty and my wireless keyboard azerty (I still do some French user support) -- being the only decent (and rude) French speaker in the technical team. Though the windows habit of defaulting the keyboard to UK layout at login is annoying. I would love it if I could set the keyboard layout independently i.e. without having all the Microsoft apps changing language.

" I would love it if I could set the keyboard layout independently i.e. without having all the Microsoft apps changing language."

Not entirely sure what you mean here - in my experience Windows allows you (and has for many years) to have multiple keyboard layouts for whatever languages you have installed, separate from the Display language. For any given installed language, you can pick a default keyboard layout and also switch between which ever ones you have configured for that language on the fly.

I used to have a similar setup, only in my case the laptop keyboard was German QWERTZ and my external wireless was UK QWERTY, and the system was installed in English. I was easily able to switch to the German layout when I was travelling using the language picker in the system tray, without affecting any display/app language.

Additionally, most of the MS apps have application specific language options. I had to find these earlier this year when I was switching my new (corporate German install image) laptop to use English as a display language, albeit with a German keyboard....

The only annoying thing for me right now is that the proofing tools don't detect what language I'm writing in, they just use whatever I had it set to last.

"Worked with a dev who was a real Francophile. He changed his (Windows) input locale to French so that he could simulate an AZERTY keyboard with a (physical) QWERTY keyboard. It caused no end of confusion when we were helping him out. Worst part was he commented his code in French!"

I'm doing this since university, actually. We then had many different KBs depending on the workstation that was available and switching from AZERTY mindset to QWERTY or reverse has always been a pain for me ...

Even today, at work (Switzerland), since I HATE the QWERTZ landscape, I'm using an AZERTY landscape on a Swiss KB.

The only issue is, I can't have anyone else type anything on my laptop :)

I just posted before reading your comment and am now distressed to find there are at least two people in the world who'd stick AZERTY onto a QWERTZ keyboard...

I write in French every now and then on a QWERTY keyboard, and I use AltGr+e for é, and let auto-correct fix other accents. The only real annoyance is "à" which isn't always picked up by auto correct and sometimes require some copy/paste instead.

I had a colleague who configured his laptop to use a Dvorak layout but didn't change the keycaps. He regarded the inability of anyone else to type anything on it as a bonus.

One step further: a friend had brought back a QWERTZ keyboard from Germany, and had stuck the AZERTY layout on it.... good luck with that one.

The Q<->A Y<->Z subs are the easy part for different keyboard layouts. The real pain in the arse is punctuation. With AZERTY you get easier access to accents, but a simple full stop needs a Shift... The M positioned next to L is annoying too.

I had this problem. Someone had installed the French default language onto the on-site server, making the admin password go from complex to insane

I spent some time working in Switzerland which has four official languages and about 427 different keyboard layouts which meant chaos when trying to work over a remote connection as it was impossible the work out what effect a keypress on your local keyboard would have.

What I never understood though was the way some keys had 4 or 5 different accented characters associate but when I was typing in German "IT ALWAYS KNEW WHICH ONE I WANTED"

Freaked me out every time

I have a Swiss version of an HP laptop. The Z and Y keys are swapped plus various other characters. If I have to use a British keyboard, it takes me ages to find the @ and ? symbols.

For people using W10 (or later I guess), Win+. makes an on-screen emoji selector appear; but it also has tabs for symbols and accents

I had this issue recently with a Swiss company's remote lab equipment that I was having to test my software on. Bearing in mind that they assured me that everything in the company was in English.

Not only did they spell my name incorrectly for the user name, they gave me a relatively long plain ASCII lowercase password (16 characters long with no 'special' characters).

However, it would not work, no matter how hard tried.

In the end I found out that their test lab was a little enclave of German speakers, and so I had to remap my password to the German keyboard layout.

My user name showed up correctly all the time as the letters in it had no transposition (otherwise that would have given the game away immediately) and of course, the password just showed *.

Agh!

When I was at uni, there was a wide selection of foreign students and I got quite proficient at installing Windows in whatever language was required. Even got reasonably proficient in AZERTY touch typing even though I can barely speak a handful of words in languages other than English (UK).

I used to work as a tester when Oracle was really hard to install in an automated manner. I used to be able to do them in languages like Japanese and Korean by remembering which buttons to press...

Back in the day of windows 98 we had a Austrian Managing Director at a company we supported.

He had a german keyboard layout (QWERTZ) on his machine.

He had the English version of windows 98 loaded, with the German layout as an option.

So if you booted the machine you hand an English layout using the German physical layout.

If you told it to switch, you now had the German layout, using the German physical layout.

And if you needed to boot to dos, you now had a US layout, using the German physical layout.

It could get a little weird at times, esp when hunting for | and \

Chloe

Need to secure a server in the "Western" world? Install a Japanese keyboard.

Job done

I found a Turkish keyboard easier to use than an AZERTY one.

I used to work for a Swedish company, although in their UK offices. My laptop originally had a Swedish keyboard on it which made finding certain keys (my locale was UK English) an interesting exercise of memory. I ended up working with a standard QWERTY keyboard next to me for the times when my memory failed (I was not allowed to connect this to the laptop - they took security seriously). Took months to convince IT (based in Sweden of course) that a Swedish keyboard for an English speaker who writes all of his documents in English is generally A Bad Idea.

When your hardware provider provides a BIOS password setting utility that runs on Windows and use then the configured version of the keyboard with caractères accentués, although when entering the password at startup it reverts to US keyboard layout.

The fist time I saw that, the user had setup a password with only letters, but unfortunately using a "A", replaced by "Q" at startup.

Cue a lot of introspection when being denied the ability to start the computer, with a call to the local subsidiary of the computer maker providing only a promise of being called back later, up to the moment the solution dawned on me.

The next password set by the user was purely numbers.