changing my vocabulary

I am sure that this wouldn’t be a problem in most professions, but when you are an interactive developer (or at least that’s what it says on my business card) there are certain things you are used to that suddenly become, well, different. The first shock is the keyboard. The pound sterling sign is gone, the@ sign is now above the 2 and the enter key is half the size as there is a button with a \ on it just above it!

OK, I get it. A mountain out of a mole hill right? I’m just moaning about a stupid keyboard… I have managed to get used to the keyboard is not the main problem.

When I worked in the UK I knew that:

• # is called a hash
• ( ) are called brackets
• { } are called curly bracket
• [ ] are called square brackets
• ! is called an exclamation mark
• . is called a full stop

The first time this came to bite me in the arse was when I was setting up my phone. “When you have entered you 4 digit code press the pound key” came the automated voice. I go looking for £, but see nothing. I ended up googling what a pound looked like to find out it is the # sign.

On Thursday last week I was (nerd alert) shouting across the room what code needs to be written. “You need to type this dot that open then close brackets.” What was written was “this.that{}” when what I was meaning is “this.that()”.

It turns out that in America:

• # is called a pound
• ( ) are called parentheses
• { } are called curly brackets
• [ ] are called square brackets
• ! is called a bang
• . is called a period

I think I have got my head around it now, but I does catch me off guard every once in a while. I was told a password the other day that was something along the lines of “wi!!son” but as I wrote what was being said it came out as “wibangbangson”.

I’m getting it now… It only took six months! (bang)