As a wise man once said , "Assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups".

I was half expecting the cause of the non-working mouse to be sabotage by co-workers for being a trouble-maker ((involuntary or otherwise)!

On a remote session with a client last week. Brand new PC being setup. Confusion as she could not get the first options selected. Finally got to a point we would screen share. And I watch her struggle with the mouse in the most bizarre ways.

Checked the surface, asked her to put a bit of paper down, got her to blow out any hairs. But this was a brand new mouse.

Eventually asked her which way the tail was pointing.... she had been using the mouse upside down.

She had been previously been using a wireless mouse. And didn't think to look at where the buttons were.

Never assume anything.

I've seen a user have trouble using the mouse because, instead of just moving it across the desk, they were "hovering" it a few mm above the surface.

Interesting. I just checked my mouse, and it seems to work fine if hovered anything up to about 5mm from the surface. :-)

it must be one of the "new-ish" with the laser sensor.... older mice with the optical (red LED) sensor or even worse, the physical ball (this shows my age...) cannot fathom not being on a surface, and a non-reflective one at that.....

As soon as I read the hovering comment I thought about the ball mice. Other things I have seen is the user running out of desk space to reach the edge of the screen, not realising that they could pick the mouse up move their hand and put it down again - or even better make the cursor move further for a given input which solves the problem permanently.

No if that happened on a graphics tablet that outdated be interesting…

In my early life, I taught some basic computer intro courses for people who -mostly- never had used computers before. Once there was a lady who complained about the difficulty in using the mouse as the cursor moved on the wrong direction(s). Sure enough, the mouse's cord was under her wrist and all went smoothly after showing her the right way to hold the device.

Then, it was because mouses were somewhat new (wireless didn't even exist at the time); now it's because those wired ones are somewhat old.

I related a tale of the mouse tail pointing the wrong way previously. I have also seen a user with non-functioning mouse due to inserting the tail into the computer the wrong way round. This was an old RS-232 connected mouse, and the damage done to the pins on the mouse by inverted insertion into the PC was terminal. I was not amused. I have seen VGA plugs inserted the wrong way round before (that seemed to require less force) but getting an RS-232 plugged in the wrong way round was new for me. The user wondered whether I could solder a new RS-232 plug onto the mouse. I stated I could, but I would charge more than the price of a mouse for that. That ended that discussion effectively

> I was half expecting the cause of the non-working mouse to be sabotage by co-workers for being a trouble-maker ((involuntary or otherwise)!

That's the glasses half-empty answer...

Sellotape or remove the ball? Inquiring minds need to know…

He just needed to open the case and put them on!

Should've gone to Specsavers.

Or at least to Barnard Castle to check his vision.

There are some Short Cummings to that plan...

Easily done!

I remember moving from PROFS to Lotus notes around the time of when we moved from green screens to laptops.

I was writing an email, and some combination of keys (such as the cuff of your jacket touching the ctlr key while you did something else) would reformat the text for you, indent it, or make it smaller/larger etc. I kept deleting the text and retyping it.

Some kind person heard the swearing, and came across to offer assistance.

Two minutes help along the lines of "ctrl Z is undo what you have just done", and "ctrl - shift... will reset". Got me sorted

She copied her a4 sheet of her "first step with Lotus Notes" which was invaluable.

Once you know there is a key for "undo" you know what to look for. I was used to green screens.

I once gor to my desk after a week off and found my colleagues had swapped my perfectly servicable Microsoft mouse with a child's vintage serial mouse, presumably taken from the prep school site.

Detemined to make the best of this colourful mouse, I decided to try to connect it to my PC.

From the box of old adapters in the comms room I found a DB25 to DB9, which I connected to a DB9 to PS/2, which I connected to a PS/2 to USB.

This all worked, after a fashion, the only problem being the buttons worked the wrong way round, either because the pins in one of the adapters were connected wrong, or it had previously belonged to a left-handed child.

Anyway, I claimed a partial victory by at least getting it to work.

> From the box of old adapters in the comms room I found a DB25 to DB9, which I connected to a DB9 to PS/2, which I connected to a PS/2 to USB.

Ahhh a serial killer

Back in the 90s I was working at a university, there was an office belonging to some affiliated organisation that we didn't really understand which we were apparently responsible for supporting.

One day I was in the office doing something or other, and the staff mentioned that they couldn't use one of the two computers in the office in the afternoon. I asked what they meant and they said it just didn't work, they seemed happy to have the afternoon off and I suspect they didn't do much work in the morning either.

Some further enquiries revealed that the computer would boot up into Windows 3.1 (yay) but they couldn't control the cursor. Worked OK in the morning, but on many (but not all) afternoons the mouse stopped working and the pointer wouldn't move.

Back in those days we couldn't Google stuff, but I did reach Jerry Pournelle's "Chaos Manor" in BYTE. Jerry had mentioned a similar problem, so I took the mouse apart and found the problem - this early opto-mechanical mouse didn't have a housing around the optical sensors. In the afternoon, sun came through the west-facing window onto the mouse and flooded the sensors. If it wasn't sunny, then the mouse would work.

Unlike today where most IT departments have a cupboard full of spare mice, we didn't and had to order one (I think it was about £25) and wait a couple of weeks. Installing the new mouse (with the internal housing) fixed the problem.

Weirdly, the users weren't happy about the fix. The whole organisation was shuttered a few years later, can't think why..

I miss Jerry Pournelle. Just checked - he died in 2017. Time flies.

I think I've related the tale previously of a sister company's MD complaining that the fancy new wireless he'd bought, without consultation, wasn't working properly with the cursor appearing to move randomly. He didn't bother to mention that he'd bought an identical mouse for the Finance Manager, and that their desks were effectively back-to-back with only a thin partition wall between. These days auto-pairing will take care of that but back then both mice were operating on the same frequency and settings.

Not a chronic problem-maker, but ... our company resold packages which were installed onto PCs (or LAN server shares). These included a relational database engine bundled with the PC/MS-DOS-based, TUI application package(s) All of our clients were "remote" -- a two to six-hour drive away -- and we provided support via vox phone, and via a DOS screen/keyboard-sharing program, "CarbonCopy+". This was in the era of 2400-baud modems.

One afternoon, I got a call from "Julie." She was trying to export selected financial donor records for a mailmerge into WordPerfect, and it wasn't working.

My boss had a Compaq sewing-machine-sized luggable PC, and I had a small desktop PC. My boss (and his PC) were out of the office when Julie called. Further, I could run CarbonCopy+ XOR my copy of (the database engine and the app), on my PC, but not both simultaneously.

Julie's symptom was that her SELECT was returning no records (empty result set).

Working out on my local copy of the DB engine+app+bogus data set, the appropriate DB command line, I asked her over the phone to type it in. I spelt it out for her letter-for-letter.

0 records found.

Hmmm ... let's try that again...

0 records found.

Let's try something else: SELECT DONORS *

0 records found.

I had her read back to me what she had typed, character-by-character. It matched. Had all the database records been blown away?!

I had her exit the DB command line, back up to the app itself, and use it to view some donor records. Yup, the data was there.

Back down to the DB command prompt. Round and round we went, until finally, a non-zero, sounds-approximately-right number of donor records. I walked her through the more-restrictive SELECT statement to get her only the donor records she wanted, and exporting the donor name and address fields to a file WordPerfect could process for mailmerging.

I don't know what she had been mistyping, and mis-reading back to me, character-by-character.

Reminds me of being an a senior management meeting where one manager was struggling to wipe the whiteboard... yes, with a wireless mouse.

Reminds me when someone put permanent markers on the tray underneath the whiteboard.

One manager was struggling to wipe the whiteboard.