People who had a good upbringing were taught to “leave things as you found them”.
You don’t go into people’s offices, homes or other private spaces and mess things up, and then just up and leave the place looking as if a tornado had been through it!
People who had a good upbringing were also taught about responsibility: the last person to handle an item is responsible for it if it breaks or goes missing!
Now, I have a gripe with Mr Bill Gates and his Windows cronies!
The car I bought is MY car; the PC I bought is MY property!
I expect other people to respect my property.
But Mr Gates and co. seem to have had no decent upbringing.
For about the last month I have had issues when typing extended ASCII characters, using the alt symbol together with three tympanum characters.
You could always type ê by holding the alt key down while typing 136.
And then, suddenly, this key combination stopped giving me an ê.
Other extended ASCII characters also stopped functioning as they always did!
Unfortunately no one has JUST ONE piece of software on their PC, but STACKS AND STACKS. That’s what it takes to use your PC productively nowadays.
So I started investigating: first suspecting software A, then after thorough investigation finding it innocent, then move on to software B, etc, etc.
In the mean time my extended ASCII characters that I used printed garbage symbols on the screen, but a man only has so many hours in a day, and I had other work to do – I didn’t plan to spend hours on fixing MY PC which Mr Gates and co. broke!
You can keep on bugging me and I will turn a blind eye, up to a point, but then…
3 O’clock this morning was that moment when I decided “enough is enough”.
I got out of bed and tackled the problem!
What did I find?
Mr Gates and co. are responsible!
With a recent Windows release they changed the value of an indicator which they had no business changing.
The LOCALE setting is an administrative setting which I, the user of MY PC, can change, if needed, for MY work circumstances.
But Mr Gates and co. changed it!
Why?
No good, sensible explanation exists, except sinister ones.
Mr Gates, if you and your chronies gain access to my property, to finish development work that you should have done before installing your software on MY PC, you need to remember that you are a GUEST on MY property, and all rules of good upbringing apply!