8 November, 2011 | Leave a Comment
Burning computer questions of the day: Why don’t French keyboards have the @ symbol? Why do you need to press shift to get a period? Oy vey. Give me Qwerty or give me death.
Anyway, on to the story, though I will preface this by saying that some of my most rage-filled computer-related moments have occurred in France, particularly re: the internet. Ahem. Okay, so I don’t have a printer with me, obviously, and today I needed to print out a chunk of my novel so I could edit it on paper (which makes a big difference). Printing is a luxury, since I don’t have a lot of money and won’t be able to print often, given the cost. But today I reached a point where I had to print. I went to an internet cafe I saw advertised in the tourist office, whose ad has American and British flags on it, which means they speak English. I went there, thinking I’d be in and out the door in five minutes. L’ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!
I opened my email account and attempted to open the docx file I had attached, but kept getting error messages, the gist of which seemed to be that the computer software is so out-dated it will not open docx files. It hadn’t occurred to me that an internet cafe would not have computers capable of opening docx files, so I was surprised. I asked for help and when the guy came to help me, he was immediately dismayed. ”Docx? Impossible. That is a brand new type of file. It originated with Microsoft Office 2007.”
“Okay, but it’s 2011 now, so…it’s not brand new.”
“This is just a trick by Microsoft to make more money. You should read about it online.”
“Yes, I know all about docx files. It was annoying when the change was made four years ago, but the world has moved on, non?”
“I refuse to install it on my computers.”
Me, becoming exasperated: “Okay, then what should I do? I need to print this. I’m in a hurry.” (I actually wasn’t in a hurry, just annoyed.)
He said we would open it in OpenOffice, but when he tried it, it wouldn’t work. “Oh la la,” he said, shaking his head. “You should tell the person who created this document to send it as a PDF.”
“I created this document. I could have saved it as a PDF, but it never occurred to me that you wouldn’t be able to open docx.”
He then went on, rambling about the evils of Microsoft and I’m thinking, I hate Microsoft as much as the next girl, but listen, old man, you own a flipping internet cafe. You have no choice but to accommodate people using Microsoft. Finally, as he rambled, he came out with this little gem: “Of course, I have the new version of Microsoft on my personal computer,” he said, pointing to his desk.
“Okay, then can I email you my document and you print it out from there?”
“Sure.” It then took him an hour to find a scrap of paper onto which he could write his email address.
Cut to him opening my file and printing it. He hands it to me and it’s in an unreadable font, which looks more like Russian than English. I say, “What is this? I can’t even read it.”
“It must have converted your font into something else. You chose a unique font for your document, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“See, this is why I tell people to use PDFs.” And then he went on about the virtues of PDFs and the evils of docx. Finally I said, “Docx is normale! In Angleterre, everyone has it!”
He looked at me in disbelief. “No, it cannot be so.”
I knew this printing error was going to cost me about 5€, but I had no choice but to ask him to print it again after changing the font and changing the spacing to 1.5 to cut down on pages. He said he could change it to Times, which I said was fine, then he began to have a meltdown over this because he couldn’t get the font to change. Finally, a female coworker took over, practically pushing him out of the way, and as she’s attempting to reformat my document, the two of them are arguing about who knows what.
In the end, he charged me half price for the screwed-up document, which was good news. The bad news? I have to go back there to do all my printing. There doesn’t seem to be anywhere else in town.
Merde.
Anglofille said @ 6:28 pm | Uncategorized | 14 Comments
The good thing is that when you go back there to do more printing, you know what has to be done to do so. Glad it all worked out!
Don’t they have the @ symbol somewhere up there with the numbers anymore ? Curious !
I hate the shift-period thing too with french keyboards.
You can get the @ by clicking ctrl + alt + the button for 0, but on the keyboard I was using, the actual @ does not appear. You just have to know the trick, I guess.
I guess we use à more often than @…
The only thing that annoys with my keyboard is that it has a £ and a $ but no euro symbol!!!
Oh dear. My British Mac has €€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€!!!!!!!
Depending on where you are, there may be a mediatheque. While the printers aren’t ‘out front’ sometimes, they will usually give you the pages and charge a reasonable price.
Also, some mairies have a computer/internet access free to the public. Even our little tiny village had a computer for use of all 176 citizens (printer incl.).
Both worth looking into if you’re going to be having more printing adventures.
what a nitemare. this is why i hate technology.
and also, this is why i always save my docs in 97-2003 format. if you click “save as”, under the file name, it says “save as type” with a drop-down where you can convert it to the 97-2003 version of word.
I was at work when I read this and shared it with our tech guys. i know it is annoying for you but it made me smile.
Germany and Denamark had difffernt keyboards as well. It was hard to type emails at the cafe using their computers. What was odd in Denmark is that no onefree wifi or I maybe I just couldn’t figure it out. I was soo spolied in USA with all of the Wifi spots. That could be a travel book….guide to internet cafe/WIFI while travelling!
Sydney, we do have a mediatheque here. I went in there the other day – I didn’t see any computers, but perhaps I need to look for them. I’ll try it.
Theresa, I guess I’ve learned my lesson with assuming everyone has .docx! I’ll just convert to .doc next time. It seems so retro.
Lisa, I’m glad I made you smile! It does seem that internet access varies depending on the country. Internet seems so essential to life, yet in some places they act like it’s a luxury. I don’t get it.
Life in many places is less internet-dependent and people look at their portable devices a lot less. I kinda like it.
I don’t have a smartphone or anything like that – I just use computer-based internet. But without internet, the financial system would be paralyzed, many public and commercial services would become unavailable, etc. I think that’s true in any industrialized nation, but in some countries in Europe, they pretend as if offering internet in hotels is an exotic luxury – for example.
That sucks. How did the other employee end up fixing the problem? I have an older version of Word but when I do get a docx I upload it to Google Docs and then copy+paste back to Word. It screws up some of the formatting but it works in a pinch. Probably not a perfect solution if you have tons of pages and distinct formatting stuff though..
Well, this guy had the new version of Word on his personal computer, so he opened my document with that. It changed the font to something unreadable, so all the co-worker had to do was change the font to Times. I have learned my lesson with this guy – I’ll only use PDFs from now on. I’ll also change the font to Times. I use Adobe Caslon Pro, but perhaps not every version of Word has that.
Microsoft has a patch that allows your computer to automatically convert docx to doc. I use it all of the time. I’m working on a 2003 at work and a 2011 at home. It’s ridiculous that he didn’t have the patch. It’s free for God’s sake and it converts automatically without any interference from me.