merry christmas to all
in Paris, condemned to what is certainly the most disagreeable keyboard layout in the world. It is not only that the keyboard letters are incommodiously arranged so as to render the most common words into gibberish -- the Q is where the A is; the Z is where the W; in place of the M is a comma, etc. There is also an unwholesome preoccupation with the shift key, to the extent that the entire number row at the top of the keyboard is swapped around with a random array of punctuation and symbols, so that one no longer presses 'Shift+3' to get the dollar sign, but must press 'Shift+"' to get 3. The semicolon, comma and exclamation mark are easier to get to than the fullstop, which probably says something about French sentences. Typing has been, for the last fifteen minutes, a painstaking ordeal -- so tiresome, in fact, that I si,ply refuse to pqnder to tis zhi,s q ,o,ent longer; qnd shqll noz touchtype zith unflinching belligerence: ?erry Christ,qs to qll1