My Russified Computer

When I went to the Mac store to buy my computer, my very first question for the saleswoman was whether I could write in Cyrillic with my Mac. From the day I've owned my beloved laptop, Russian has been one of its languages.

At some point along the way, as I actually started doing more Internet searches in Russian, my computer began to occasionally assume that Russian was my preferred language. When I first downloaded Mozilla FireFox, the company directed me to the Russian version as the default. My iTunes switched from English to Russian at some point during my updates. Last night, as I tried to establish my first Google Group (an email list that will hopefully permit me to notify people when my wedding blog is updated), Google Groups came up in Russian as the default. I went through the Russian form a little more slowly than I would have managed the English, but I understood it nonetheless, and, as always, I was a little proud of my bilingual computer literacy. I put Eli and I on the Google Group, selected the settings, and called it a night.

A few minutes later, I happen to be looking over Eli's shoulder as he sits at his he says, "What!" His invitation to the Google Group had arrived . . . written in Russian. We laughed so hard we could barely talk. We tried to envision what would have happened had we sent the Russian version to forty of so friends and family. Eli pronouned me a silly person for permitting my computer to interact with me in whatever language in chose, without ever trying to steer it toward English. As we turned in for the night, I promise to erase the google group the following morning and start over in the king's English.

I just took care of the problem, and I didn't have to erase the group and start from scratch. It turns out that it's really easy to change the language on the existing group. Curiously, the emails notifying people that they've been added to the group now arrive in English, but Google Groups still presents me with a Russian-language interface.