For economic reasons, I decided I was not going to ship my once state of the art gaming computer to Portugal when I moved. “The Beast,” as she was known, would have almost doubled my shipping costs by the time all the relevant insurances had been applied. It was simply not worth it.
She was sold to friend with whom I hear she is very happy.
This meant that when I got here I shared a computer with Mr P. As anyone knows, sharing a computer is a delicate affair at the best of times and although we did not come to blows or even utter a cross word it soon became apparent that we needed another computer.
Getting a laptop was the short term solution as I had plans to buy an iMac when my “proceeds of sale” arrived.
As with all things, I followed my father’s advice and bought the best I could afford at the time — say hello to my Toshiba Satellite L750 — complete with cat for added effectiveness!
This is where the fun began.
The laptop was bought in Portugal — it has a Portuguese keyboard:
So — switch it on — “What language do you wish to use” — English of course — CLICK.
We now have a Portuguese laptop with an English keyboard superimposed on the top of it.
The Portuguese language is difficult to learn — it has lots of accents.
There are 23 letters in the Portuguese alphabet (not including diacritics). The other three letters of the English alphabet — K, W, Y — are viewed as “foreign” in Portuguese.
Now we have a keyboard with some foreign letters and, horror of horrors, none of the punctuation marks or symbols are where they should be except for the full stop/period, the comma, and inverted commas. The rest is a totally mystery as is why the “C” key does not work.
I have to copy and paste all the “C”s into my posts along with any special punctuation required.
That is mildly irritating, but “liveable with.” Writing posts in Microsoft Word makes things a little easier with the spell checker and punctuation hints.
Yes, we have done all the checks as to why the “C” key does not work and cleaned the keyboard — all to no avail.
We have still not found the “at” symbol — thank goodness for the reply button in Gmail.
The real fun comes when Mr P uses the laptop — which travels with us when we are away — and it will not write in “proper” Portuguese, either!
The good news is that while I was writing this post, I found the semi colon! One down; 20 or so to go!
So, spare a thought for David — who has to treble check all of my work before posting!