Today’s lesson: humility.

Our six-year-old mechanical mouse died in a cloud of lint balls and splintered pieces on the tile floor last night. We were still able to use the touchpad and pointer on our laptop, but prefer to use a mouse. Unfortunately, the only other mouse we had was a freebie wireless optical mouse that neither Marv nor I had ever gotten to work with our laptops.

This morning, while trying to get the wireless mouse to work, I happened to be on webcam with my computer-savvy mom.

“Did you put batteries in? Is the light on?” she asked.

“What batteries? I don’t see any place where I can put batteries. No screws. Nothing. And there’s no lightbulb. This thing is crap!” I declared.

Knowing better than to argue with me, she didn’t press it any further.

I packed everything up and rushed off with Stephen to District 3, the computer store section of Nguyen Thi Minh Khai Street. We were lucky to find a good computer supply store. We bought a wired optical mouse and an adorable glow-in-the-dark koala bear gel wrist rest for Stephen. The plug-and-play mouse worked perfectly when we got home.

It just didn’t seem right that the wireless mouse didn’t work. I got a screwdriver and inserted it into one of the seams of the mouse. Through the little crack, I could see the glint of battery coils. When I slid the cover of the mouse back, I saw spaces for two AAA batteries. Once the batteries were in place, the wireless mouse worked too.

Now there was just one more small problem. Having never used an optical mouse before, I couldn’t understand why the mouse didn’t move smoothly and tended to jump around the screen. Despite Stephen’s protests, I wrestled the mouse away from his Bob the Builder clicking fingers and found this tip from the College of Dupage:

Occasionally, the erratic behavior of an optical mouse is because of the surface under the mouse. The optical mouse determines movement by comparing differences in the surface below. A solid color below won?t work. You?ll need to use it on a surface that has texture or color differences.

Using the mouse on the white desktop wasn’t working for us. A Nick Bantock mouse pad seems to have solved the problem.

You learn something new every day. And I learned that I’m just as big an idiot as the other people I complain about.

ETA: We ended up trying several different surfaces for the mouse. An old newsletter with a small font printed on non-glossy paper seems to be best.

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