The flags led to a tense discussion with my boss once. At my first office job in Canada, I was given a Mac. I activated US QWERTY for programming and CSA to be

The flags led to a tense discussion with my boss once. At my first office job in Canada, I was given a Mac. I activated US QWERTY for programming and CSA to be able to write messages with French accents. One day not long after, I'm programming with US QWERTY enabled – US flag in the menu bar – and my boss comes up behind me, points, and says, "What ... is ... that ... ?" It felt like it took forever to convince him that the flag just signified that I was using a particular keyboard layout and that it didn't mean anything else – to me, anyway. All completely avoidable. For better or worse, people assign a lot of meaning to flags. I can see why it's sensible to avoid using them for something benign like keyboard layout.