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Midimusic.org.uk Computer Humour, Hardware

2.8 Mice

Once optional, now essential, the mouse is one of the most misused, misunderstood peripherals in the home computer market. Keyboards and printers are easier to grasp by those already familiar with typewriters, but the principles of the mouse are incomprehensible to the mainstream.

Several years ago I was at a computer show demoing software. The audience was comprised of retired school teachers. I explained how to use the mouse to point to things on the screen. As I walked around the room making sure everyone was doing ok, I saw one woman holding her mouse to the Mac's monitor moving the mouse around on the screen.

One customer held the mouse in the air and pointed it at the screen like a TV remote, all the while clicking madly.

I was teaching a user about windows.

Still, nothing was happening on the screen. Finally I looked over her right shoulder to see what she was doing. She had raised the mouse literally up -- about a foot off the desk.

I spent several minutes having the user follow the cable from the the mouse to the back of the PC. It was plugged in all the way.

One lady, in an Excel class, was having a terrible time with the mouse until the instructor noticed that she was literally pointing with her finger and clicking the mouse.

The consultant hears two clicks. The consultant hears the two clicks again.

And another user was all confused about why the cursor always moved in the opposite direction from the movement of the mouse. She also complained about how hard it was to hit the buttons. She was quite embarrassed when we asked her to rotate the mouse so the tail pointed away from her.

While training over the phone I heard, "Oh, wait. Uh oh!!" I asked repeatedly, "What? What's happening?" expecting to hear smoke was pouring out of her computer.

Finally she recovered enough to scream, "My keyboard's in the way! I can't move my mouse!"

I had a customer who phone in a panic because his mouse pointer wouldn't go any further across the screen. After the usual questions to see if the computer had frozen (it hadn't) the customer said, "No, it won't go any further because I've run out of desk space." The guy thought that position of the mouse on the desk was analogous to the position of the pointer on the screen. He had no idea you could pick the mouse up and move it without screwing things up.

I remember when my Amiga arrived, way back in 1986. I had a class to go to, but my roommate was kind enough to set it all up for me. When I got back from class, he was having a great time playing with it. His only problem was using the mouse. Turns out he was holding it in his hand and rolling the ball with his fingers. I don't even remember how he was coping with the mouse buttons.

We taught first-years how to cope with using a computer. We had one chap who spent ages with the mouse upside down, using it as a trackball, before he came and asked us if there was a better way.

We had a member call up with the usual connection problems and the tech rep on the call was wondering why it was taking the member unusually long to do the simplest task such as selecting an item from the menubar. The member said that her cat had eaten her mouse ball and she had to move the cursor by putting her finger in the cavity where the mouse ball used to be and moving the rollers manually.

My mother wanted to look up something on the Internet. Having never touched a computer let alone the Internet, I showed her how to use the mouse and the significance of the hyperlink. She said, "I want to see what this page says," so I told her to put the mouse pointer over the icon and click the left mouse button. She successfully navigated the cursor to the icon, picked up the mouse to eye level, looked at the button she wanted to click, clicked it, and asked, "Did I do it right?"

Some years ago, I was watching Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. During the scene where Scotty picks up the mouse and speaks into it. I laughed my lungs out. My father looked at me, slightly confused, and said, "What's so funny? Is it inoperative?"

The client was physically touching the screen with the mouse. I had her put her poor mouse down onto its mouse pad and vainly tried to explain to her the relationship between mouse and cursor. She didn't get it. It was like a video game that was too hard for her.

Every time this customer calls back, he repeats his stance that despite the fact that he has two mouse buttons, he does not right click.

I had designed a program in VisualBasic which, at several points, comes up with a dialog box and requires the user to hit one of two buttons to make a selection (they look like the familiar "Ok" and "Cancel" buttons).

A particularly bright Ph.D. beta tested the program for me. She came to my office and said that it didn't work. I followed her to the terminal, and she showed me how clicking the mouse buttons wasn't doing anything. She had misunderstood the words "click on the button which corresponds to your choice" and thought that the left mouse button corresponded to the left choice, and the right mouse button corresponded to the right choice. So the mouse cursor wasn't over my dialog buttons at all, and she was clicking madly somewhere else on the screen.

One customer complained that her mouse was hard to control with the dust cover on it. The dust cover turned out to be the plastic bag in which the mouse was packaged.

I had a guy call up and say his mouse didn't work with AOL. Come to find out, he had installed his mouse inside his computer. I don't know how he did that or why he thought it was a good idea -- and I'm not so sure I want to.

An exasperated caller said she couldn't get her new computer to turn on.

The foot pedal turned out to be the mouse.

Overheard in a computer shop:

One particular day like any other, an older woman purchased a Macintosh and dragged it home. A little while later we received an angry phone call from the woman. Apparently, she had set her whole system up without incident until she came across the mouse pad we included at no extra charge. "Which side," she demanded, "of the mouse pad faces upwards???" Despite the brightly colored red company logo emblazoned on one side of the pad, the woman scolded us for not including appropriate instructions.

Most people figure out that a PC mouse has either two or three buttons on it, allowing one to left click or right click the mouse. This has escaped some individuals when the wheel button was invented. When I ask customers to left click the mouse, several have exclaimed to me, "I can't left click you stupid idiot! This mouse only has one round button in the middle!"

I was talking to an older guy who made a point of telling me he was computer illiterate. (Surprise!) I made sure that I was spoke very clearly and in great detail. We were attempting to check some information in Dial-Up Networking.

I hear clicking noises for at least thirty seconds.

Once again there is a far more clicking than is necessary.

This stopped me dead. What kind of mouse could this guy have? It couldn't have been a Mac mouse, because there would be no way it would have worked with a PC.

I worked as a computer teacher's assistant at college level school (in my city). It was a beginners' course, so I expected many of the students to know nothing or very little. The biggest misunderstanding was how the mouse functioned.

In a different class, I started one of the sessions by saying, "Today I'm going to help you learn how to use the mouse." Many of the women jumped up from their seats and looked nervous.

The DOS version of our product requires the installation of a DOS-based mouse driver. Our technical support department received a call from someone at Walt Disney World who said they didn't have a DOS-based mouse driver. We had her install a DOS-based mouse driver and started her on the successful road to installation. Yes, now we can truthfully say we helped Disney with their "mouse problem."

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