Don't mind Tea. You've hit her sore point. She gets really, really anoyed at the arrogant, pig-headed insistence American software companies have on pretending that there is no such place as Therestoftheworld, except insofar as extracting money from it matters. Example
numero uno: Windows installation. Micro$oft absolutely, positively insist that you must, repeat must buy Windows from their local distribution arm, at a locally inflated price (of course). This, they explain, is because they go to a lot of trouble and spend a lot of money to customise local distributions to suit local customers.
This is, of course, complete, unvarnished, 100% pure wallabyshit. They do no local customisation whatsoever. Zip. Nada. None. Customisation budget for Microsoft Australia: US$000,000.00. In Australian dolars that works out (roughly) to zero. So actually, you could use any version of Windows, they are all exactly the same.
But if you buy Windows from some other part of the world (e.g., Canada, because it's cheaper), they write you a nasty letter explaining that if you ever do it again they will fire off a salvo of corporate lawyers at you and tie you up in court for the rest of your natural life, if any.
Meanwhile, you get the benefits of their "locally customised" Windows install CD, which is (surprise, surprise) actually the same CD they distribute to all the other countries in the Asia-Pacific. And you guessed it, it defaults to American English. So you have to:
- Select Australian English (click, scroll up, wait (because the scroll routine is broken and it takes a while) select, and click again).
- Go to the 3rd tab across and select Australian English again on the Unicode page.
- Select Australia from the country selection menu (some serious slow scrolling here, unless you know the keyboard shortcutclick to take you to Afganistan, which is then a shorter distance to the one you need).
- But wait, there's more .... You'd think after you have selected your Therestoftheworld location three different times in three different places already, that that would be enough for even the stupidest, most arrogant of American software companies. Nope. Now that you've told it where you are three times, you have to tell it where you are.
- Time-zone: Click, huge scroll down, and it insists on scrolling every single line o n e l i n e a t a t i m e until you get to the location you have already told it to use three times now. And there is still more ...
- Default language. Hey, didn't we already select our language? Yup, four times so far. But you have to do it again because telling a Micro$oft product what you need four times in a row isn't enough. Now you have to change the default language because .... how did we guess ... those arrogant bastards in Seattle think you want to use American English even though you have already selected a different language and place four times in a row. You have to remove American English as default language, and even this isn't as easy as you might think (unless you know what you are doing) as it obstinately pops back up again in the language selection window every time you press OK because the language doesn't change until you reboot and the language selection routine is broken and keeps on displaying the deleted language. I've seen people go around and around and around 10 times trying to delete US English.
