User complained his mouse wasn’t working. But he wasn’t using a mouse Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's Friday column in which we share your astounding tales of being asked to tackle tech support jobs that seemingly defy common sense. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Brian" who told us of the time he worked for an outsourcer that had a contract to provide tech support in a …
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.
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No if that happened on a graphics tablet that outdated be interesting…
> No if that happened on a graphics tablet that outdated be interesting…
Interestingly Wacom graphics tablets (at least the older Graphire and Bamboo Fun ones that I've used) run in a "relative" touchpad-like HID mode if their driver software isn't installed - in which case, needing to pick up the pen and reposition it is a distinct possibility.
(Typing this on a machine equipped with an oldskool ball mouse, by the way - as well as an IBM Model M keyboard!)
I once needed to get some files off a friend's computer while they were out.
Moving the mouse pointer just a small distance required repeated movements of the mouse across the entire width of the desk, then picking it up and going back.
So I popped open the mouse and discovered that the area around the mouse ball was ABSOLUTELY STUFFED with fluff.
I cleaned out the fluff, scraped the rollers clean, and reassembled. Mouse working properly.
Then the friend came back and started to use his machine. He wondered what the hell was up with the mouse as he was used to just how hard to use it had been stuffed with fluff.
The demise of the mouse ball was a big improvement.
FWIW my Logitech M105 mouse tracks movement perfectly up to an above-desk altitude of about 1.5mm. However, it freezes if I try to use it any higher.
However, this is a fairly useless discovery since its quite difficult to use the mouse at this height unless some of the fingertips of the mouse-holding hand are touching the desk to keep the mouse at a relatively constant altitude.
Written off as a curious but ultimately useless experiment of the "Is it lunchtime yet?" variety.
even worse, the physical ball (this shows my age...)
You're not that old - I still recall my optical Sun mouse with the lined mousemat. I used to regularly annoy my CAD operators by rotating the mat if they left the office for a skive ...
To be brutally honest, I use one of those ambidextrous Logitech trackballs. They've been around for donkey's years and they're awesome. Plus you can do some serious damage with the ball if you pick it out and use it as a magic missile.
"Interesting. I just checked my mouse, and it seems to work fine if hovered anything up to about 5mm from the surface. :-)"
My previous one did that (at home) and the position I sit, it often raised from a desk a little as the heel of my hand slid across the desk. Sadly, it dies, and the new one seems to stop working at slightest hint of a lift off the surface. Very annoying!
Once in the early days of macs delivered a new computer to someone. I opened the box, but he wanted to set it up himself. got dragged into my bosses office and asked what i did with the mouse that should have come with the computer. The guy had not looked at the packing and had thrown the mouse away with the box. i had never taken anything out of the box, just opened it. they used to tape the mouse into the styrofoam packing.
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.
"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."
Back in the early days of "IBM compatible" PCs, when some OEMs were still building their own thing that, while MS-DOS, was NOT an "IBM compatible", Apricot were selling computers with infrared "wireless" mice and keyboards. Not especially common, granted, but probably date back further than many realise.
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
Maybe I'll give you credit for me thinking "I wonder where the tail is"....
I have also seen the DIN mouse damage. Still remember the person who tried to ROTATE the mouse plug into place. The twisting action flattening and bending every pin. Took a lot of tweezing out with thin nosed pliers and a pen knife to bring it back to life. Why did we take so long to get to the USB3 "either way up is fine" standard?
I've seen a serial mouse for a BBC Micro have its DIN plug squashed onto the composite video BNC connector("well, they are both round"). Apparently it fell out a few times but then they got it to stay, before complainng it didn't work.
I would have laughed, but they were borrowing my computer and peripherals!
When I worked as a PC builder I discovered that if you try hard enough, it's possible to insert a RAM module in the wrong way around. The impressive part was that although the person that did it wasn't that technical, they'd been working there for years and had probably installed thousands of DIMMs, but never stopped to wonder why this particular DIMM required much more force than all the others.
In the context of SWMBO trying to coax a response out of an Alexa device, that isn't funny.
Actually, it is funny. SWMBO has a penchant for speaking at a perfectly audible level but either mumbling the words or inventing her own syntax, despite repeated demonstrations - or both.
"Alexa" - (softly) no response - "Alexa" - Bong "Er.. an announcement"........"I'm sorry I can't help you with that".
"ALEXA! Announcement to make" (spoken over Alexa's response "what's the announcement?" ... "Teas ready" Alexa duly announces "Make", ignoring anything else it's told to day.
She'll get the hang of it, bless her.
Anon 'cos I like my tea in a cup, not over my head.
Tudur Owen did a skit on Alexa for The Now Show (now sadly defunct) some years ago. Very funny and in 2018 I posted a link. Unfortunately that YouTube link is dead and I can't find another. Anyone have any luck?
M.
Dom Joly did a skit where he kept asking Alexa to do stuff. I was listening to it on a speaker while in a holiday home that had an Echo, so of course it kept trying to do whatever he was saying, which fortunately wasn't "order seventeen dozen eggs" or "google donkey porn" but was nevertheless very annoying. Also the skit wasn't very funny, I don't know why I didn't just stop the damn thing.
I've actually walked out wearing the wrong leather coat from a bowling alley, fortunately with the guys phone in it as well, a fact I found out while going to work & he rang me\himself the next morning.
Also done the same with shoes once (TBF Canadians all remove their shoes on entering a house) - They fitted surprisingly well, the friends feet didn't fit into mine quite so comfortably.
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.
There used to be strips you could put above your F keys to remind you how to do things in WordPerfect. There's enough key commands in more modern software that I think an updated version would be useful. I wish MS hadn't decided Alt + Space was going to be used to pop up a useless AI rather than bringing up the window control menu as it has been since Windows 1.0x. That comes in very handy if a window disappears off screen.
There's always a way to do the stuff you've done for years. It's just a shame that MS keep changing that stuff to something different that takes more actions to achieve the same thing in the name of making things "better". Like clicking the clock doesn’t bring up the calendar any more, it brings up a minimised calendar + notifications so you have to click another button on that to get the calendar. And the other "multiple function" task icons that all require one to click to select and another click to get what used to take one click, like network+battery+sound, three functions that now all take two clicks to get to where one used to take you.
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.
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 have mixed feelings about Pournelle... I was once asked to be on a panel discussion at an SF con with him. It was during one of his...better lubricated...periods and he was at least two sheets to the wind. Any time he couldn't make his point rationally or logically, he tried making it louder. I got a lot of sympathy from the audience...
Ever since reading his columns in Byte ijn the 1980s I've disliked Pournelle. He was a Trump supporter and, apparently, a belligerent alcoholic. He didn't endear himself to the people running ARPAnet in 1985. They gave him unofficial access and asked him not to reveal that in his column; he mentioned it anyway, then he got nasty with them, so they locked his account. He threatened to use his contacts and influence to make life hard difficult for them, claiming he was being discriminated against for his politics and not his own entitled attitude. A fascist jerk.
Pournelle wasn't the only well-lubricated SF author. At the WorldCon in Boston (1980-ish?) I went to see an author panel on world-building. Marion Zimmer Bradley was someone I particularly wanted to hear, I do not remember who else was on the panel, but we heard only Phillip Jose Farmer, who got a death hold on the microphone and blathered on, not allowing a word from anyone else. If he had been an interesting speaker, OK. But he was a mean, sloppy drunk with a superiority complex. That made me vow to never read a single word he ever wrote.
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.
Had a very similar incident with a Sun Microsystem pizza box (SPARCstation 1?). Had a fancy optical mouse while I still had a 386 PS/2 with a clunky old mouse, but it needed the shiny metal mouse mat. At the time I thought it was all cool and space-age. Until the summer sun caught the mat.
As a grocery saw a checkstand conveyor belt that wouldn't shut off when the afternoon sun flooded in the front window onto the photoeye receiver. Higher-spec photoeyes have used a modulated beam so they can filter out signal from DC sources such as the sun, or mains-frequency hum from ambient lighting. I wonder how well that works now that the lighting uses switching power supplies.
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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.
"I don't know what she had been mistyping, and mis-reading back to me, character-by-character."
Was she from a manual typewriter background? Some had "missing" characters such one or both of 1 and 0 missing, using lower case L for 1 and capital letter O for zero. Maybe years of that and muscle memory she failed to notice the O and 0 or l and 1 are not the same keys on a computer :-)
Last week I witnessed someone almost use a marker on an LCD interactive screen fortunately they realised in time.
But permanent markers on whiteboards are a common problem in office. Fortunately some isopropyl and elbow grease will eventually take care of it.
Some of the teachers at my school used to either not notice or forget to retract the pull-down projection screen in front of the new-fangled drywipe boards that were being gradually deployed. There were numerous screens around the school with the odd letter or two written on them where someone had started writing then realised it was the wrong surface.
"But permanent markers on whiteboards are a common problem in office. Fortunately some isopropyl and elbow grease will eventually take care of it."
The fix is to go over the permanent marker with a whiteboard marker it lifts off quite quickly (Use isopropyl only for extreme cases\stains).
Wrecks the surface though. I've had people try to remove the marker with stuff like xylene (from the lab stock bottle that no-one is allowed to use for serious work anymore as it's a bit nasty) before. Comes off nicely... but subsequently anything that wiped off before now leaves around a 10% transparency shadow.
There are worse things to use
Back in the 80s Jif/Cif (the cream cleaner) made a big thing about not scratching surfaces
I knew from high school biology experiments on various substances (testing "with enzymes" claims of various products) that it has microfine abrasive in it (pumice)
A few years after high school I found the techs at our repair centre cleaning the whiteboards of the training annex during our pre-christmas cleanup - with Jif
Sure enough, the (VERY EXPENSIVE in the 1980s) porcelain coated magnetic whiteboards became nearly impossible to wipe clean of whiteboard marker during training sessions due to the myriad fine scratches in it. The only solution was..... "MORE JIF!"
As a result the boards were being changed out every 3-4 years at about £1000 a pop and whiteboards got a bad reputation for unreliability
If I said it was a telco people will probably understand the mentality at work during this period (demonstrating the abrasive existed didn't help nor did pointing to the manufacturer instructions that the best way to clean most whiteboards is warm soapy water with a dash of isopropyl if absolutely needed, or just about any ammonia-based glass cleaner)
Had the misfortune of a broken touchpad on my 'nice' laptop with the quad core processor I'd sourced from Ukraine.
Cue some very intricate micro-soldering to 'fix' the two corroded through-holes with some itty bitty solder blobs.
Yeah, full on Macgyver here (tm) also had to change the EPROM on an LCD and do some really gnarly repairs
on at least one LGA775 processor that somehow (!) got it to detect the second memory channel.
Seriously though, who fixes this sort of problem now?
Had to change the button on car keyring(s), also hack the firmware on a TV by using an external USB with some
hand written code to get it out of a boot loop so it would then allow me to reset the petaQ' and avoid a callout.
Fixing mice is a rite of passage and it is actually very simple to swap out an LED or change a button.
Just received a really cheap processor for my 'projects' that will likely get put in my SFF which will reduce its
power usage considerably for 3D printing / laser etching and other such uses
I've posted this before, but since it's all about mice and confusion:-
When my stepdad got his first computer it took him a couple of weeks to get out of the habit of moving the mouse up to try to make the arrow go down, and moving it down to make the arrow go up.
He had the best of all excuses - he had been the tailgunner in a Wellington bomber during the war.
Yeah, one of of those weird metal perspective things. Are you moving a roll of paper up and down while viewing through a "window" or moving the "window" up and down over long roll of paper. Something we take for granted nowadays because of persistence of one of the models, but wasn't so obvious when people had not really experienced it back in the day.
Oh the fun we used to have with the off-white opto-mechanical mice that shipped with our Compaq Deskpro 2000 machines.
Whenever the user reported the pointer was moving erratically or just downright unresponsive, it was almost always someone sat near a window. The fix was to drop the blind, swap it for a mouse made of darker or thicker plastic, or get the user to move desks.
Then of course there were the wavy CRT issues on hot days, and insisting the users move or turn off their desk fans...
"Given that hands are opaque how are they not shielding the mice from stray sunlight?"
After fixing a few using black tape inside the housing, either it shines thru a crack, diffuses thru plastic, or both. The users hand rarely covers the entire surface. In twenty years of service calls I only saw it twice.
a 'fred' during my attendence/gainful employment with HM government
His reputation was well deserved.... and if you want to know why we wasted so much money on some projects..... fred.
The words "Its a fred project" would trickle down the grapevine and lo... a once bustling place would magically empty as the staff went to their assigned hiding spaces while the mangler went "I'm sure 15 people signed this morning..".... then he'd have a flash of inspiration, and shout out "Theres overtime with this project"*.. a siren call to those of us short on cash.. but did the lure of big money overcome the fear of a fred project......
*this call was used to check to see if any member of staff was dead although it was later proved that people would respond with "I'll do it" even after rigor mortis had set in..
Once worked with a Fred. Part of his job was to fault-find PCBs (non-IC) to component level
Some of the guys that worked around his were of boffin standard and if they ever needed a transistor or two for their latest project they would just rummage through Fred's bin of discarded parts to find a suitable working component
(I never worked out why they weren't doing the faulting and leaving Fred to do something simpler... it would have been faster and simpler)
I mean, trying to use the glasses case as a mouse is passable until you look at it, and realize the mouse isn't there.
But actively expecing it to work as a mouse or smearing your monitor with white fluid, if you haven't slept over for the last 40 years like Captain America,... no.
Had a laser/infrared mouse that only worked with the supplied mat.
The mat had a quite attractive and complex neon blue/silver pattern that the mouse was specificallty engineered to work with.
Without the matching mat it was a brick.
May have been one of Logitech's earlier creations but not sure.
Worked with a group of AS/400 admins who had never used PCs and WIMP interfaces before. This was about 2005 and literally none of them had ever used a mouse before. Most were pretty fast learners but one simply couldn't get it - he could just about move the cursor, but then had to completely take his hand off the mouse and hold it above to jab down with his index finger to (hopefully) press the button. Unfortunately this would knock the mouse so he rarely hit the right icon on the screen, and he simply couldn't 'jab' fast enough to double-click. Dragging was out of the question. He was super-embarrassed but some people simply don't have the capability to learn new fine-motor control tasks in adulthood.
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