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I've heard stories about inspection for the keyboards but never experienced it myself. I only have been working for the past 5 years but for something you say happen once a month, it look like I'm pretty lucky. I'm on an English keyboard by the way.

I guess there is language racism, people here are expected to speak English when most of us doesn't handle it that well. When we travel in an English country, we have to speak in English, when we travel to a Spanish country, we do our best to talk Spanish, we expect the same of you. Sadly even people that have been here for a long time doesn't even try to learn French. Most of the superior I had are only speaking English.

Don't you learn Spanish as a second language in US? How would you react if you would be expected to use Spanish that much?

> My friend is COO of a large, successful international enterprise software company (I won't mention the company). All his programmers use English keyboards, but his company will be shut down if they don't use French keyboards. So they keep a stash of French keyboards in the closet. Every few months, the Language Police do an inspection and they have to bring out the French keyboards and pretend that they are using them to do all their work as good French citizens.

Wow, French here, I find this most shocking. Can't the programmers use the French keyboard all the time but simply map it to the US layout (I do that myself).

Only the physical products need to be in french. The reason behind this is that an employee that doesn't know a word of english has to be able to use all the tools without having to ask for a french version (a french speaking employee in a workplace where the management is english speaking may get discriminated against otherwise).

My keyboard is french, but its layout is english and so is my OS and all my softwares. However, I had to change the language myself since everything come out of the box as french.

Of course there is racism, there is racism everywhere. The difference with Québec is that the racists are racist against wealthy white people who are not use to be on that side of the medal.

> So they keep a stash of French keyboards in the closet.

Here, even if we are french speaking, we simply stick french stickers on things. No need to buy extra products this way ;)

'wealthy white people'

Like.. the... French Canadians?

Stickers work too, but I'm guessing that in their case they just don't want to deal with applying stickers to a lot of keys and then removing them. We also had to put some stickers on vending and coffee machines.

We used to be audited every year but after we made a lot of progress they starting coming once every 2-3 years.

I think they started auditing after complaints, we're a manufacturing company in the suburbs with 99% French speaking employees but a lot of the stuff we had was English only. Fun fact, our parent company in Texas was careful and made sure we had French documentation/communication but French speaking office employees didn't seem to care.

It is sad to me that nobody in this thread knows what racism is.