A feature in which a guest writer vents some bile over an issue which really grinds their gears. This month, Gavin Fitzgerald laments the current unstable status of keyboard functions, and the international tensions which arise thereof. 

Keyboards.

We use them all the time, right? They are our means of accessing the beautiful world that is the internet. They are the ever-dependable link between what I want to write, and what appears on screen. Punch a key, and a letter appears – genius. We’ve all had those times when a pesky mouse freezes on us and we’ve had to rely on the good old keyboard to save our bacon, with its trusty Windows key and the fail-safe Ctrl+Alt+Delete combo. If there was any pliability at all to a keyboard, you’d hug the damn thing and whisper sweet words to it when it saves you from those kinds of situations. Well, I would.

My course involves computers, and hence keyboards. I have to use them every day. I use them in college, I use them at home, and in the future I’m sure I’m going to use them in my workplace. I depend on them. Their labelled keys are golden promises, a solid contract of trust between man and machine, without which there would be UTTER CHAOS. No matter how shit things are, at least your keyboard loves you… so when I hit the ‘Delete’ key, I fucking well expect stuff to be deleted.

Obviously, I do not want to use the ‘Home’ key when I hit the key labelled ‘Delete’, but for some reason beyond all comprehension, there are sick, sad people out there who keep swapping the functions of these keys in certain UCC computer labs, and that makes me madder than a hunchback in a limbo contest. As it’s the 21st century, I would have assumed that every sentient person who has any awareness of torrents, memes, and general internet culture knows what that key at the top right of the keyboard does. It’s not ‘Home’, it’s ‘Delete’. DELETE.

The Delete/Home swapping is a crime I encounter with infuriating regularity , but then there’s another one which is equally aggravating, but this time, the aggressors have the cheek to try and defend their actions: I’m talking about the @ and “ switcheroo. I’ve lost track of the amount of times that I have been logging into an account of some kind and instead of writing something similar to gavin@gmail.com (not my real email, I’m so much more creative than that), I ended up with a gavin”gmail.com. Some conniving bastard had taken it upon his or herself to swap the function of the keys and, as such, when I hit enter I was informed that my email input was invalid. INVALID. The humiliation, the deceit, the OUTRAGE of it all.

‘But this is the way it’s done in America!’, some moron exclaims before bringing up the frankly irrelevant argument that America is the birthplace of the PC to begin with. My counter-argument is always along these lines: ‘Where the hell do you people think the English language came from? Not that it stops you spelling grey with the letter ‘a’, or mistaking ‘chips’ for ‘fries’, and generally adopting a bastardized dialect of my mother tongue!’ And so on.

Now, while I can appreciate the conniver’s side of this (I am, after all, a reasonable man), that yes indeed, the original keyboard was designed and manufactured in America, the thought that I should have to yield to a Yanky formality sends shivers down my spine. If those haughty Americans feel they have the right to butcher spelling, then I shall retain my right to properly labelled key functions, FUCK YOU VERY MUCH. Perhaps if I could lay in wait and catch some of these people, I might be able to scream at them and shake them until they see sense and reason – but that never happens. I don’t doubt that I could knock some sense into them, but, despite the long hours spent hiding the nooks and crannies of the Boole Library, in full camouflage attire with night vision goggles, ready to scold the perpetrator into reform, I never seem to catch them in the act. The only way to make the enemy see reason is to start running some sort of insurgency mission in America – bringing sneaky guerrilla tactics to their schools and homes, stealthily changing every @ to an “ – then retreating en mass to watch their society implode (insert evil laugh here).

But alas, maybe there is no way to win this war. Considering America is the greatest military power in the world, is it slightly over-ambitious to hope that a small number of Irish students can challenge the techie status quo? Will I have to suffer on in this world where the function of keyboard keys may forever more be in a state of upheaval? Is a universal consensus on the proper status of that key on the top right-hand corner forever out of reach? And might we all have to bow to the ways of an Imperialist system?

A bleak and gray forecast indeed – but all is not lost. Never forget, comrades, that ‘Home’ is where 7 the number is.