Return key instructions

[bhskittykatt]

With Daylight Savings Time, we received a memo directing us how to change the time on some of our systems. They broke it down into teeny tiny steps. Very teeny tiny steps. I just had to share one of them:

Enter your login name and press the Return key. The Return key is just right of center on the keyboard by the quotation mark key. (It has a bent arrow and says "Enter" on it)

It scares me that there are so many people who had trouble with this that they needed to pretty much give you a map to find it.

[Chromatix]

...and, for that matter, reminding them how to *log in*.

[fireheart]

I'd find it hilarious if it said "You need to press ANY key to continue. There is no ANY key. Pressing enter, space or y will get you the same result."

[MadonnaC]

The 'any' key is on the bottom of the keyboard. Please turn the keyboard over and press the bottom of the keyboard

[dbuzman]

Enter your login name and press the Return key. The Return key is just right of center on the keyboard by the quotation mark key. (It has a bent arrow and says "Enter" on it)

If it says Enter, doesn't that make it the Enter key?

[Daemonmonkey]

What about "Please press F5" (click-click) "Nothing happens?!"...

[Sandman]

those instructions are for those who press the Tab button and expect soda to come out

[Chromatix]

Technically, the Enter key is the one on the keypad, and (in accordance with it's location) means "finished entering this data field". The Return key corresponds to the old typewriter "carriage return" mechanism, which was given it's own key in the electric-typewriter era.

Real keyboards do not mark the Return key as Enter. Even Apple, with their deliberately non-standard keyboard layouts, get this right. My best keyboards just have the bent-arrow symbol.

In spreadsheet programs the two keys often do different things. I've seen at least one spreadsheet which uses Return for "enter data and then edit the next cell down", Tab for "enter data and then edit the next cell across", and Enter for "enter data and stay in place" or "start editing this cell" depending on context.

[Shalom]

One of my previous jobs involved data entry on IBM 3151 terminals (with genuine 15-year-old Model M keyboards). These terminals talked to an RS/6000 in the back room, which basically was a baby mainframe, or at least had to be interacted with as if it were a mainframe. This means, you had a screen with various writable fields in it. You'd enter data into each field, TAB to the next one, and so on, and when you filled out all the fields you hit Send (at the bottom right) and it would send the entire screen to the computer at once, which would respond with your next screen. (If you started typing when you weren't on a field, it would lock up the terminal. This was the hardest part for people raised on microcomputers to get used to.)

There was also a return key, in the usual location, but nobody could ever figure out what it did.

[It's me]

Multiline entry....

[underemployeed]

I wonder how many people in your company perished because they forgot to say "Breath, by inhaling than exhaling"

[Shalom]

Ah, so you mean if a field had more than one line in it, the return key would go to the next line in the same field?

That would make sense, but we wouldn't have known about that, because as far as I can remember, all our fields were one line high. If they needed more, they'd write it as two (or more) single line fields, one above the next. It's been seven years since I touched an RS6K, so my memory is a bit fuzzy on this.

[Pojodan]

Step 16: Read the line of this document that reads: 'Step 1', and continue through the document until you read 'Step 17'