Keyboard mappings

Yes, I do have an anecdote about keyboard mappings. Bear with.

I was working at a large company that had a mainframe: a big computer shared by thousands of people. Once upon a time, everyone had had a terminal, but no one had that any more. They had a terminal emulator on a PC. But a mainframe terminal has a lot more keys than a PC keyboard, so the emulator had keyboard mappings, and you could edit them so that the ones you needed were easily available. If you needed to press "Program Attention 1" you could make, say, Shift+PageUp do that.

I didn't do much mainframe stuff, but I worked with people who did. Sometimes there was too much work, and they'd get contractors in. And one advantage of contractors is that if they're no use, they're easy to get rid of. One bloke came with an list of previous projects he'd supposedly worked on, but it turned out that he knew very little. He couldn't do the job. But he was also very reluctant to ask for help. Maybe he knew he'd get found out. He struggled on for a while but everyone realised that he wouldn't be back for his second week. So while he was at lunch someone (not me!) remapped his teminal emulator keys.

Now, on the mainframe, the Enter key would submit what you'd typed, and by convention F3 was exit. Mr Contractor knew at least that much. But those keys were now swapped. That afternoon, whenever he tried to enter he exited and whenever he tried to exit he entered. He didn't notice that the office had gone very quiet. We were all watching him. He could start up the editor where he was supposed to be writing code. Then he'd make some changes and submit, but the editor would close. Now most people would get annoyed if that kept happening. Not this chap. Every time it happened he sat and looked at the screen. It was like his brain had stopped. Then he'd recover his senses and try again, but every time the editor would exit.

Eventually he tried exiting on purpose, and his changes were submitted. Now he was really stumped. Eventually, after an hour or so of this, he told someone he was having trouble, and was shown how to remap the keyboard. He might have then said "Oh, you bastards played a trick on me!" But he didn't say a word. I guess he knew that we all knew that he didn't know what he was doing.

One of the people on the team was a business analyst. So, not so technically minded, but a half way house between techies and civilians. He was in on the joke. But when he was away from his desk, the joker struck again (and again, is was't me!). The BA's surname began with G, and so his login ID also began with G. And the joke this time was to prize the key caps off the G and H keys and put them back the other way around. So the BA comes back and tries to log in to some mainframe system. He's not a touch typist. He's looking at the keys. His login doesn't work, and after a few attempts, he realises that he's typing the wrong letter at the start of his ID. But he's not a foolish as Mr Contractor - he knows what to do! He opens the keyboard mapping for the terminal emulator and swaps over G and H. All sorted. Now he can log in. He carries on happily for a while. Then he comes out of the terminal emulator and tries to log in to something on his PC. His ID is coming out wrong again. We all figure that he'll realise now what's going on and the joke is over. No, he asks "How do you remap the keyboard for a PC application?"

#keyboard

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