Re: Varieties of rodent
Just for ah, research purposes, you don't happen to have have any images of those 'nipple controllers' you mention do you ?
While the mice were all the same, back in the '90s I used to support a large office of admin staff processing complaints and refunds etc for a big credit card company. Close to 100 staff on a massive open plan floor with the French section here, German team there, Dutch round the corner etc. etc. - all with their own national keyboard layouts. Trying to sort out local issues, especially typing into the command prompt and the like to rejig lan connections and printers etc. was a bleedin' nightmare !!
The printer setup in particular was horrific, each team connected to different printers that had different languaged headed paper loaded, with different sub-flavours of headers in each tray depending on what level of customer the letter was for; gold card, platinum etc all had differently embossed paper.
Some folk handled customers in multiple languages, not just their native ones, each PC having a little set of paper badges at the top with the flags of the languages the staff member could be useful in, so they needed mapping to multiple sets of printers and have multiple keyboard setups in Windows, all configured manually on a machine by machine basis.
With a big staff turnover requiring a lot of reassigning of machines to new staff, general user tinkering, machine replacements etc - keeping that lot going even vaguely smoothly was akin to painting a suspension bridge with water-soluble paint - the social life was great though !
Biting the hand that feeds IT
