Keyboard

Per request of a certain nerd I know and love, *cough*Dad!*cough* here’s a picture of what the keyboards look like in Japan. As with all the pictures on this blog, you can click on it to get a bigger view if you want to scrutinize it.


You’ll notice that there is only the left half of the spacebar. You can imagine how well this works for someone like me who only uses the right half. The first couple times I used one of these, I accidentally hit the button to the right of the spacebar with my thumb and suddenly found myself typing nonsense in hiragana (Japanese letters, basically). Using my computer logic, I hit the button again to see if it changed back. No such luck. I tried it again. Nope. I was stuck in the middle of a painstakingly written e-mail with no way to continue except in incomprehensible jibberish.

It wasn’t until much later that, upon hearing the colorful metaphors I was directing at my computer, someone showed me that pressing the key in the top left corner of the keyboard would reset it.

Nonetheless, I still very much prefer to use my laptop and its heavily-worn-on-the-right-side-not-the-left-side spacebar.