On the Paris Charles de Gaulle airport, I encountered this internet kiosk:
Nothing unusual? That’s what I thought, too. Until I took a closer look at the keyboard:
The first thing you’ll notice is the unusual keyboard layout, at least for us QWERTY people – presumably this is how they like their keyboards in France. But a worse thing is that the keyboard does not have a whole bunch of “useless” keys, such as say underscore (_). As it turns out, my email password contains an underscore.
So how do I sign into my email? I tried to find the underscore character on the web (Google: underscore), and copy-and-paste it into the password box. To make it more interesting, the keyboard does not have a CTRL key, so no CTRL+C. Also, no other conventional way of using the clipboard seems to work. Eventually, after I nearly gave up, I discovered that the kiosk app has clipboard features on the toolbar above the browser window, and I finally managed to type in my password.
Time to type my password: 6 minutes.
6 minutes is a small price to pay to save the republic.
Hello from France,
The photo shows a special keyboard that I had never seen before !
It may be a special one for tourists…
In France, keyboards contains the same keys as the other languages, but at another places… like most of the rest of the world !
Cheers
Hello Loïc,
Thanks for your perspective from across the ocean!
You are right: normal French keyboards are very similar to US keyboards, except that the letter layout is AZERTY instead of QWERTY.
So, not all French keyboards are strange, just this particular one. 🙂
Igor