Language settings...

I was born in England, and according to British laws, I am British by birth.  However, my father was a US serviceman, so was raised as an American, and spent all of my adult life in the United States.


Recently, due to unforeseen circumstances, I have now relocated back to England.  


This has caused a little bit of annoying "problems."


First, when I started working here, I was given a British keyboard.  Now, please look at the two layouts below.

British Keyboard Layout

United States Keyboard Layout

As you can see, they are primarily the same keyboard.  However, please look at the differences.   And these cause issues for someone like me.  For example, while using a British keyboards, I would consistently hit "\" when I am trying to add a capital letter, because the left shift is half the size and the add the | \ key next to the Z.  Or when I think I am hitting Enter, I keep adding a # character instead.  This apparently small differences can completely throw off someone who has been using the same keyboard layout for roughly 25 years. 


So, I went to Amazon.co.uk, ordered two US keyboards for about £5 each.  So now I am using a US keyboard, and changed the language settings on Windows to use English (US) to that it would know that I am using the correct keyboard.


There is ONE slight annoyance for doing this...when I boot up the computers.  The IT department have various scripts that run during boot up.  All of these scripts use English (UK).  Due to this, I have to pretend I am using a British keyboard when I first login.  Once I login, my roaming profile takes over and the system thinks I use English (US).   


You see, from my time working in the Department of Defense field for 10 years, I've gotten into the have gotten into the habit of using strong passwords.  So I use special characters, along with numerals and upper & lower case letter.  Well as you can see, because of the differences in the placement of special characters I have to think twice before character selection.  For example, if I use "$" in a password, I have a slight problem during my initial login after a reboot, or boot up.  Mainly because there isn't a "$" on a British keyboard.  So, I either have to remember its ALT code, or I have to use another symbol.  As I mentioned, a slight annoyance, but easily handled.


Another slight annoyance is...date formatting.  In the United States the format is MM/DD/YYYY.  However, here in England the format is DD/MM/YYYY.  Question: Why isn't there an international date format?


Regardless of where I live, 03/07/2012 should always mean the same thing.  Is this March 7th, 2012?  Or is this July 3rd, 2012?  Doesn't matter, should always be one or the other, not both depending on which chunk of earth I happen to reside.


You see, this particular issue continues to bite me in the ass.  I use Google Docs (now Google Drive) for a variety of things, one of the things I've been using it for is as an account log book (ie, check book).  Google docs, unlike MS   Office only provides you with formatted dates based on the language settings you have set for your Google profile.  This bugs me.  You see, I want my language to be English (US) for things like spell check.  Because I want to use "color" vs "colour."  Or "check" vs "cheque."  But because of work, and such, I want the date to be in the British format (DD/MM/YYYY) rather than in the US format (MM/DD/YYYY) but I can't.

Now granted, this particular rant should be against Google for not allowing a mish mash whenever it comes to data formatting within a spreadsheet, but I still think that there should be an international standard for formatting something that we all use...such as date.