Okay the weirdest thing happened to me today. I’m just going about my business, and chatting with a few people online, when all of a sudden everything I type goes in backward. The cursor would stay at the start of the line and the letters would just go in normally, albeit in the wrong order. At first I really didn’t even notice, because I was typing and looking at my other monitor. Then it started worrying me. What could have caused this? Did I somehow activate a international feature in Windows for languages that read right to left? Well I racked my brain, and also kept up my conversations on instant messenger, mostly because it was really funny seeing different people’s reactions to it. To my surprise no one at all had trouble reading the backward text, and they all recognized it immediately. Two people were cracking up while another was convinced I had downloaded some program to do it. The other possibility of course in the back of my mind that I had gotten a virus with a sense of humor. I suspected this doubly because I never get viruses in my email but today I received (and Norton caught) four of them.
Anyway, back to the mystery of the backward typing (gnipyt sdrawkcab), it turns out that when I had gotten a call I put an hard drive down on my desk, however it was on top of my wireless keyboard. Specifically, on top of the left arrow button! Try it, hold down the left arrow button with something and then start typing. It was a very chance thing as well, because if had been in Word or a text box like I am now I would have seen the cursor whizzing by and suspected a key down, but in the chat boxes there was nothing to indicated that the cursor being pushed to the left. Now I better go before they take my geek license away :). (Actually, I was installing GNU/Linux on said other machine so they let me keep it. Whew.)
that’s crazy! but that’s pretty rad, too. i’m glad your computer isn’t infected. my old mac had this weird virus on microsoft word that would randomly type in a scrabble winner’s words where the cursor was, for some reason… something like “i have 95, you have 108, but with ‘phone’ and triple word score, i get 114. therefore i win.” (the math might be wrong, but i’m just giving you an example.) IT WAS FREAKY. i thought some ghost was typing into my computer. anyway, that’s my little anecdote.
Hey Matt – thanks for the post – you just saved me a ton of troubleshooting and reboots and lord knows what else. The same thing just happened to me, except the culprit was the ‘down arrow’. I have a media center pc in my living room, and the wireless keyboard was on the coffee table and I logged into the PC from my laptop using VNC. Lo and behold, out of nowhere, it starts misbehaving – I bring up the task manager and can’t open the processes tab. Windows scroll across the screen seemingly by themselves. I can’t open programs or get to my a/v – had me freaked out. I managed to open ‘run’ and tried to type in cmd which came out dmc. I googled ‘backwards typing’ and yours was the first hit – it turns out a corner of a small dry erase board was pressing the down arrow of the cursor keys. I was sure it was some kind of trojan, malware or virus. More than 4 years later, your post saved the day. Thanks very much!!!!
thanks matt!
in my case it was the sticky keys in accessibility options… but it did turn out that it was an arrow key that was affected.
google search = this link, and the answer.
thanks!
You are now officially my hero! I’ve been stumped (try googling while typing backwards sometime!) all afternoon, but finally hit your link and discovered my problem! In my case it’s a laptop with a stuck left arrow key.
Thank you SO much for posting this! 🙂 Have a Merry Christmas!
thank u so much! i couldn’t understand what was going on when it happened to me. although with mine, it was only happening when i used google or the address bar. i thought it might have been something to do with google… like an april fools joke, only not in april :(. i knew that typing in backwards into a search engine would get me no where so i chanced upon writing sdrawkcab and i found your article. and ur suggestion worked! thank u so much! i too also thought that it might be a virus :S. may u help many more of us 🙂
^.^ !oot ti xif nac I woN !uoy knahT
!pleh .kcuts syek on s’ereht dna sdrawkcab gnipyt s’enim
Christ Jesus !this fix i do how