Where's my keyboard?

Before I left for Ohio, I asked the office manager if she could use her pull with the hardware folks to get someone to speed up my computer. I came back to the office to find that someone had been on my computer and for the first week, it was Speedy Habib.

Speedy Habib is a joke from a trip I took once...the sort of joke that you shouldn't explain because you weren't there, but there was this guy climbing a mountain side. He was going really fast...oh, forget it. Just trust me. He wasn't Speedy Gonzalez, he was Speedy Habib.

So my computer was at the Indianapolis 500 for the first week I was back and then it realized I had come home because it is almost to the crawl it was before I left. When I returned, the first thing I noticed was missing was the tool bar at the bottom of my monitor screen.

The second thing I noticed was that my Irish keyboard toggle was gone!

I wailed. I tore at my hair. I almost fainted. I told my boss that while I was most grateful for the assistance, and I hated to be a complainer, things were missing that I used.

I didn't tell him it was my Irish keyboard because obviously. I'm not sitting here recruiting Irish folk for jobs in Central Iowa although I'm happy to do so and four years ago found an Irish bloke a job, but I digress.

So here I am without my useful and important keyboard, the one I miss every day of my working life and today I decide to participate in the World o'Twitter. I am quoting Zig Ziglar, who is a smart chap, and I need a hash tag so I can give him credit because although I am completely unfamiliar with Twitter and don't know what I'm doing, I assume I should give the man proper credit. I hit Shift-3, which should give me a hash tag or a pound sign or a sharp sign. Depends all on what sector of the universe you live in, I suppose.

But look what I got instead: #

Now you may feel bewildered at this point and lunging for a view of your 3 key to see the hash tag right there. That's what I just did.

But in a MS Word document, I get a British pound sign. Like a dollar sign $, see? Only for the Royal Wedding. For the other side of the pond. For the losing side of the Revolution. I can't find a hash tag anywhere on my keyboard now unless I'm online. Also confusing for Twitter is the @ sign, which on an Irish keyboard is the double quote key.

See, I was in Word typing out my Twitter because I am lazy (copy&paste) and curious and wanted to see how many characters it was...Whatever! The point is now I am stuck with the Irish keyboard I rarely use but couldn't live without because the toggle has gone missing.

Unless I'm online. Then apparently I am typing in U.S. English. Which means all my Tweets will have to be written out by my very own fingers. Dang. My head hurts.