Thursday 25 February 2010

Learning the hard way - no two laptop keyboards are alike

I learnt a (apparently very obvious) thing yesterday in a hard way. The fact is, just like humans, no two laptop keyboard layouts are alike. My wife created a beautiful PowerPoint presentation on her laptop with quite some effort in the evening. She asked me to just browse through it so that it goes through a second set of eyes. As helpful as ever (at least in my humble opinion, my wife may differ there), I happily went through it, admiring her work, using right-hand topmost key on her laptop keyboard, assuming it to be the "Page Up" key like it was on my laptop. Then I started wondering why the number of slides is going down as I page up, only to realize to my horror, I had been pounding away on "Delete" key. But by then, 7 to 8 slides had been erased.

Consequences - My wife putting another hour or so in the night to get her presentation to its prior glory. For me, if I tell you I was tweeting at 1 o'clock in night, you get the picture.

Moral of the story - Never ever start pounding away on a laptop that is not yours without paying close attention to the keyboard layout. No two laptop keyboards are alike.

Here is how my laptop keyboard looks like-



And here is hers-