The "My-Brain-knows-my-keyboard" syndrom

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I am Austrian working in France. Therefore, my old laptop built in Austria has a german keyboard (QWERTZ), with german umlauts and stuff. But my workstation in my french office has a french keyboard (AZERTY) with lots of accents and the digit symbols are accessible by pressing shift only … jada jada jada…

Anyway, the thing is: the situation is not that bad, since my brain autmatically adapts to the computer, and “knows” how to use the french keyboard on my workstation and the german keyboard on the laptop.

You will say, big deal, we get used to the new keyboard quickly. NO! The real confusion starts, when I use my wife’s laptop or my bosses laptop, both of which have french keyboards. My brain “thinks” that it is my laptop and tries to adapt to a german keyboard even though it is a french one (even if I typed on a french keyboard on my workstation before!!!) So, I use my french workstation, then I change for the french laptop, and somehow my brain tells me, “hey, you are using a laptop, therefore the keyboard must be german”, and I start to make typos …

The type of the keyboard (or the type of the computer) is included in the feature set used by the brain to distinguish between different keyboards.

Isn’t the human brain wonderful?

2

Yes, yes it is.

My brain does not accept that a two-door car or truck could have an automatic transmission.

3

Yep, flonks, it’s amazing. I couldn’t just tell you what order the keys are in on my keyboard. I’d have to type the alphabet one letter at a time and plot it out on a piece of paper.

In fact, that’s exactly what I had to do two weeks ago. I spilled soy sauce on my keyboard. In order to get it clean, I had to remove and clean all the keys.

Couldn’t figure out where they went, for the life of me.