Suddenly I remembered one of the funny mistakes I’ve made during my life.

A long time ago, we got one of these new fancy laserprinters at work, and of course I wanted to use it. So I printed a document and went to the printer to fetch it, where I noticed that it said “Redo” on the display.

So I went back to my office, printed the document again, went to printer and once again noticed the “Redo”. Back to office, a third attempt, same result … suddenly I noticed that there were several copies of my document laying ready to be fetched!!! What???

Slowly my brain started work, I’ve always used English on my computers and at time I was a using Unix a lot, also in English. Basically my whole computing environment was in English … but for some reason the people who set up the printer had decided to use localize the printer to Swedish.

When my brain had come that far, I could only slap my forehead - the “Redo” I’ve seen wasn’t a message in English telling me to redo everything. The message was in Swedish, telling me that the printer was ready for the next document (Swedish “redo” means “ready” in English)