When keys on keyboards get switched

A common problem at my school. Caused by punk kids who see humor in spelling out various obsenities by switching around the little key caps. Some day I'd like to see some newbie walk up to one of these machines, start typing, and look really confused as what is on the keyboard is rather different that what shows up on the screen. And since when did home row contain SEXCOW?

One of the more imaginative keyboard defacements I've seen was switching around the order of the keypad, so instead of the usual computer style:

789
456
123

The keys were "telephone style"...

123
456
789

Of course, being the touch typist that I am, none of these defacements are a problem for me.

I once heard a pretty funny anecdote on this. Seems that back in the days of mini computers, a computer lab had just gotten a new terminal, and it behaved very strange: the guy who would have to use it couldn't log in when he was sitting in front of the terminal. But when he wanted to demonstrate it to somebody else, that person could log in just fine. He tried again himself - and could log in too! He sat down again, looged out and tried again -and was denied access. Now it got weird. He tried many times, and always, without fail, the terminal didn't let him in when he was sitting in front of it, but worked fine when he was standing. WTF?? some sort of freak problem with electrical potentials that changed with the position of the person in front of the terminal??

Well, turns out the explanation was much easier: two of the keys on the keyboard had been switched (or wrongly labeled), and the operator was a touch typist when sitting down, but not when standing up...