Expert alert

Nick Clark provides this week's job of the week, from Jobserve.

‘Please can your Skillswatch colleagues let me know what the current hourly rate is?’ he says. We can’t, Nick, because, like you, we have no idea what the job actually is.

‘We are actively recruiting for a major blue chip client of ours in the automotive industry. We are looking for a subject matter expert who is concerned with VMS operating systems,’ it says, opaquely. ‘Candidates from an automotive background will certainly be benefited.’

Question: does that mean most of the time we recruit ‘non-experts’? Look around your office, then you decide.

That winking feeling

A stunning reaction to the problem of what to do with the Alt-Gr key. Squillions of you write to say that Alt-Gr-4 is how you type the Euro symbol.

‘But what it’s been doing between 1985 and the introduction of the Euro symbol is still a mystery,’ says Andrew Kirby.

‘On an Argentinian keyboard, you have to press Alt-Gr+2 to produce the @ sign,’ adds David Walton. Others point out that Alt-Gr allows you to add accents to letters, and a few go so far as to send in little ready reckoner tables.

But the mystery is solved by Robert Eccleston, at Creation Financial Services. ‘It’s essential if you want to make a Winking-man-with-moustache Smiley Face out of the top left key, the one next to the exclamation mark, like this: `¬ı ,’ he says. ‘Isn’t technology marvellous?’

Now we want to know what the ‘Gr’ stands for.

Off his trolley

Peter Joyce read our piece about the web site that plots abandoned trolleys on a map of Nottingham as a work of art.

‘I went straight to the site with eager anticipation. I was aghast to see a picture of a shopping trolley, not a trolley-bus.

As a keen digger-upper of old trolley-bus rails, I was hoping for some new sightings. Back to the surreptitious metal detecting in the heart of our cities.’

How does one surreptitiously detect metal? And if you do dig up old trolley-bus rails, what do you do with them, there not being any trolley-buses to run on them? Suddenly the shopping trolley thing seems almost worthwhile…