M&Ns

"I like to click"

The title is M&Ns, but I bet that now you're thinking about yummy milk chocolate in a hard shell that melts in your mouth, not in your hands!


Once upon a time, several years ago in the land of small town life I had a job as a receptionist. I worked with a woman who regularly explained why she had more and better experience than I did, why her typing was better. I typed over 110 wpm, had a college degree in business management, and had over 10 years of professional experience, had significant writing experience, and was computer savvy. She typed approximately 60 wpm, had a one-year secretarial school degree received in the late 60s, sent out professional letters for high-up muckety-mucks with significant grammar problems, and couldn't figure out how to use her computer but was a whiz on a typewriter.

She was higher on the food chain than I was, so I had to defer all issues to her (although I regularly snuck onto the server to correct her grammar mistakes before she could send out badly written letters). This became pretty tiring, so I decided I had to do something small to make myself feel better.

I was planning a two-week vacation during which she and other coworkers would need to spend some time sitting at my desk (as the receptionist I answered the phone and handled all walk-ins), so I decided to do something very small. I assumed that many people wouldn't even notice it, and if they did it would only take a few minutes for them to figure out how to fix it.

I popped off the m and n key on my keyboard and switched them so that the m key was on the left and the n key was on the right.Here's the thing, I just had to look down at my keyboard to see whether the m goes on the left or the right.  I'm a trained touch typist. I have absolutely no idea where the keys on a keyboard are because it's all muscle memory. Ten years ago, my filthy keyboard was bothering me so I popped off all the keys to clean it then had to contact Soupkills for a picture of where all the keys go on the keyboard so I could reassemble it.

I went off on my two-week motorcycle tour through portions of New York and Pennsylvania, and when I returned the office was in an uproar. My little prank had brought the place to a complete standstill. Three different top tier secretarial staff members, a student worker, some of her friends, and even the boss had tried to figure out the problem. Nobody could figure out why pressing the M key brought up an N and vice versa. It didn't occur to anybody that the problem might be the keyboard. They assumed it was a software issue!

So they took the obvious solution and called IT. The IT person checked the keyboard configuration remotely based on their assumption that the problem was with the inside workings of the machine and not on the hardware. I'm assuming they checked if it was set-up to still use a QWERTY keyboard, looked to see if there had been any manual changes made, etc. They couldn't find anything wrong. What surprises me is that nobody in IT thought to ask about the keyboard itself.

IT made an appointment to send a person in to look at the computer later in the week, and in the meantime they let someone come over and borrow a laptop to use at my desk. When IT arrived several days later, they probably had a good (hidden) giggle because it wasn't until then that the switch had been discovered. IT popped the keys off, replaced them, explained the problem, and left.

With so many people going ballistic, I maintained my innocence and reminded them that when I started that job (a year earlier), I'd spent several hours cleaning my desk, keyboard, computer, and phone. I pointed out that I had actually popped several keys off the keyboard to remove the previous receptionist's hair because it was tangled around the undersides of the keys and making the letters stick (true story - but I'd put the keys back correctly).

I explained that as a touch typist I wouldn't have even noticed that the keys were switched, and I showed them that the keys were so worn that a lot of the letters were half-missing. Honestly, half the m was worn off, so it wasn't that different from the n anyway (the keyboard had lowercase letters on the keys).

Having had this experience, what I really want to know is what happened when somebody made the below passive aggressive key switch.

I hate when lists have one item per page, but this one is like that.  Sorry!

Let me know how long it takes you to figure out what's been done to the above, passive aggressive keyboard!