I got a new IBM ThinkPad with the new job.  So far, so good…it’s not a bad machine at all.  I really like it, except for one thing.  The frigging Fn key.  For some reason IBM thought that they would shake things up and switch the positions of the Fn and Ctrl keys on the left side of the keyboard.  NOW THAT’S NOT ANNOYING AT ALL.

It’s probably been this way forever, maybe it was this way first and the other way is wrong (and in that case, I apologize to IBM and redirect this rant to the others who decided to make this superfluous change), but what’s the point of not having something like this standardized?  Sometimes things get changed just for the sake of change, and that change is not usually helpful to anyone.  From a business perspective, there is no financial benefit whether it is one way or the other.  It doesn’t save IBM any money at all.  I would be more in support of removing the Caps Lock key then just changing key positions; at least that saves some key parts while removing a key that is nearly obsolete.

At the same time, swapping the Fn and Ctrl keys doesn’t help the computer’s user be any more efficient; actually it has slightly inconvenienced me over the last couple of days.  Why make pointless changes?  Is it just to be different, unique?  I don’t get it…it doesn’t make any sense.

Obviously this is a small thing, a tiny aggravation in my life that I will eventually adjust to.  Unfortunately, once I do feel accustomed to the key positioning, I’ll have to jump over to my Dell laptop to do something.