My Experiences in Austria - Part II

First day at McAfee, Linz office – The Keyboards

We were expected to reach office at 9:30 AM and surprisingly enough, we did manage to reach at the work place in time. Surprising, because we had had a long and tiring journey and it felt as if 15 hours of sleep wouldn’t have been enough. Reached office, greeted our colleagues and got all settled with the laptops. The manager of the Austrian team was ready with his training stuff and asked us to install operating systems on our machines so that setup could be done ASAP. We took the CDs and completed the installation successfully. People who have been doing setups would know what’s next. Yes, getting these systems on the network. We installed the network drivers and gave the IPs for all the systems. In order to check if the IPs were correct and pinging each other, I went to the DOS prompt and keyed in “ipconfig /all” (command used for checking IP and DNS). The command didn’t work fine and threw an error. “Arey!!” To my surprise, I could see the command typed in as “ipconfig -all” instead of “ipconfig /all”. Also when I started giving the Computer Name, I could not find “y”; then realized “y” was at “z” location and vice-versa. After some confusion and ingenious findings, we realized it was a German keyboard that we were using. Bizarre, at least for us! We never realized it before encountering this situation. We were experiencing a feeling of amazement and amusement. This was really a new and unexpected experience.
Wait, this is not the end of it. I reported this to one of my Austrian colleagues. Understanding the issue, he asked me “Chetan, what language do you speak??” Pompously, I said, “British English!!”. He was happy to note that, as he was a European. He handed over a new keyboard to me; I changed the Regional Settings in the Add Remove Programs and was happy using the same. After all, I could now type “ipconfig /all”, “y” and “z” was at the right places. But the pleasure was shorted lived. I could not find “@” and “#”. Poor me! After some analysis I realized that it was a “British Keyboard”. "Oh no!" That’s what I uttered in dismay and my colleague who was sited just behind me in the cube did not take too long to comprehend that what I required was a US keyboard and guided me on the whereabouts of the keyboard. I had to open up a rack that was untouched for some years, I believe, to find the US keyboard. I felt glad, a feeling I could only compare with a sentiment of attaining nirvana. (On second thoughts, nirvana is too much to say, but still). FYI, the keyboards we use are called “QWERTY” keyboards, for obvious reasons.