'Invisible mouse' made a mess of PC rebuild

Welcome to yet another Monday, and therefore to this week's edition of Who, Me? For those unfamiliar, it's The Register's reader-contributed column that shares your stories of workplace messes, and how you tried to clean them up without dirtying your career prospects. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Steve" who sent …

[Korev]

I hope they learnt from their mistake and it didn't happen mice

[Aladdin Sane]

How cheesy.

[blu3b3rry]

My bench is normally somewhat organised chaos, although I tidy it a bit every so often so that I can keep track of where stuff is.

I did have the "pleasure" of being moved to another site for six months in a previous position at ~WORKPLACE. Upon my return to the HQ we had at the time I find that my desk had been handed to an intern on secondment from another department. To say the guy was messy was an understatement. I recall coming back to a surface covered in a thin film of spilled coffee, a keyboard (thankfully not mine, I'd taken that with me) that was completey rank, full of food crumbs and spilled drinks, and food wrappers everywhere. There basically wasn't the space to put anything down without it being on top of something else. Cleaners apparently wouldn't touch it and I can't really blame them.

Upon lifting the keyboard to chuck it into the WEEE waste (it was that disgusting) I found a half-eaten sandwich that was starting to grow its own fluffy layer.

I'm no primadonna but genuinely can't understand how someone can work like that. I heard from some of the other interns this guy was living with that they lost their house deposit.

He had a ground floor room (and bathroom) and effectively didn't clean any of it for the year or so they were all living there...

[NXM]

spite

Then, to get back at you, he turned the velociraptor fence off....

[Doctor Syntax]

"starting to grow its own fluffy layer."

Grow your own penicillin.

[Stevie]

I walked over to a colleague's desk and the one next to him was covered in mouse droppings because the slob next door was so messy. "He's a genius" they said.

When he left they pulled out all the piles of greenbar paper under the desk and found a nest of mice - dead mice.

I won't tolerate people in close proximity to me who are so intelligent they grow rodents.

[Anonymous Coward]

A tidy fesk

Is the sign of someone with not enough to do, but there's a limit, some of the techs are utter neat freaks, some I worry could lose their kids if their homes are like their desks.

Mine, I call it "busy" and do try to leave it clean and tidy on a Friday.

Some of the stuff that comes back after hardware refresh though, bio hazard about covers it and, excepting the stuff that's been used in factories, workshops etc the stuff that comes back from women is usually the worst.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: A tidy fesk

Local TV station was doing a piece about my boss. They wanted a bit of 'b roll' of him interacting with his staff. They decided on having him hand me one of our products which we then appear to discuss while I'm sat at my desk. My boss was reluctant at first, saying my desk was too messy to appear on TV. The cameraman commented "it shows he's working, people with a tidy desk don't do any work". The boss's desk was spotless even part way through the working day.

[Paul Hovnanian]

Re: A tidy fesk

"If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?"

- Albert Einstein

[jn5250]

Re: A tidy fesk

My desk has often(always) been cluttered so it has been one of my favorite sayings. Did not know Einstein said it first.

[O'Reg Inalsin]

Re: A tidy fesk

Quotes misattributed to a famous person are not uncommon - regardless of this particular case.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: A tidy fesk

A vacancy?

[jake]

Re: A tidy fesk

My office is quite tidy. I run several businesses, and all paperwork is filed appropriately. Makes life easier.

My lab is ... well, let's just say keep your mitts off my piling system. It's not yours, and you are incapable of understanding it.

My shop is somewhat untidy, but all the tools are put away daily and grease/oil/whatever spills are taken care of immediately. Metal chips are removed weekly.

The various out buildings are pretty much as you might expect ... but I don't allow trash to build up. Anywhere.

The barns get their cobwebs and dust in the rafters blasted out a couple times per year whether they need it or not.

[Flightmode]

Re: A tidy fesk

”Piling system”, I’m stealing that.

[The Oncoming Scorn]

Re: A tidy fesk

So am I!

[Flocke Kroes]

Re: A tidy desk ...

... is a sign of a cluttered desk draw. That clutter has value: put it on empty space you will need tomorrow or someone else will find a use for that space.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: A tidy desk ...

Where I first worked after graduating, there was a clear desk policy. All desks had to be clear of everything at the end of the working day (unless you were still sat at it on overtime or covering a night shift). Security would check overnight and anything not in a secure cabinet (and I mean SECURE - bars and locks that would need serious cutting gear to bypass) was taken away and a note left in its place - the note saying to report to security to explain why you had breached rules (and a second on your personnel file).

It was a discipline that has served me well in the succeeding years as it instilled disciplines for an efficient and effective workflow. When tasks arrive, you either deal with them straight away (if urgent and important) or schedule a time to deal with them. Admittedly, this was in the days before email (when everything was on paper - typed or handwritten) but can still be applied in the digital workplace. The company offered courses on time management to those who needed them - something that, perhaps, should nowadays be part of any school or college curriculum.

[Korev]

Re: A tidy desk ...

I used to be mega-organised with all my finance stuff, I could go back and find a bill in seconds. Then one day I thought to myself "When was the last time I needed to find a bank statement from 2009?" and stopped pretty much immediately! Now I just scan the stuff I know I'll need for my tax return and then dump everything into a file. The end result is that I don't waste time on pointless organisation.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: A tidy desk ...

"All desks had to be clear of everything at the end of the working day ... Security would check overnight and anything not in a secure cabinet was taken away and a note left in its place - the note saying to report to security to explain why you had breached rules"

Did you ever find out what Security was doing with all the PCs they'd collected?

[collinsl]

Re: A tidy desk ...

In an environment with that level of security they'd probably be bolted to the desk

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: A tidy desk ...

OP here: It was in the 1970’s, a time before PCs were around.

We had a teletype as a terminal in a room off our main office - that was networked to a PDP8 on which I could run small programs direct, or queue (FORTRAN) to the KDF9 mainframe.

In fact, even pocket calculators were still a novelty. Slide rules and log tables were the main tools to supplement mental arithmetic back then. I had a Sinclair Scientific Calculator (bought at cost from a firm for which I’d worked part-time as a student) that was often borrowed by management.

[UCAP]

Re: A tidy desk ...

Back in the 1990s, my desk with next to my boss (someone I actually got on very well with and ended up working with him off-and-on for about 30 years). At that time I was providing remote support for a part of the ground system supporting a space mission which meant I had a big DEC Ultrix workstation taking up a lot of my desk. This turned out to be a good thing since I positioned it at the boundary between my and my bosses desks, which stopped his piles of forgotten paperwork from invading my desk space.

I had to resort to other measures once the space mission was finished the workstation disappeared.

[David Hicklin]

Re: A tidy desk ...

A manager I once worked for had a 2nd desk butted up to his desk end one to one side making an "L" shape. On this desk there were 4 piles of paperwork (memo's and such like - this is before email!).

On his own desk there were 2 piles.

As one pile on his disk became to high he would shuffle them all over by one place with the one on the end of the 2nd desk "falling off" into the bin. His logic was that if someone had not queried something by the time it reached there (about 6 months) then it was unimportant and could be ignored.

[M.V. Lipvig]

Re: A tidy desk ...

Others finding a use for my clear space keeps my trash can occupied. If I didn't put it there, into the trash it goes. Ask about it and nope, never saw it, as you can see there's only my stuff here, perhaps you should check your own desk.

I was the same way in the break room when I worked in the office. Leave your dirty dishes in the sink when I needed to wash mine, yours went into the trash. I always left the break room cleaner than I found it.

[breakfast]

Re: A tidy fesk

My desk has quite a lot of things on it, not all of which probably need to be but I spend a lot of time here. I'm fine with that but I hate an untidy desktop in my OS. When I see someone's desktop and it has icons and folders just lying around in the background I start twitching. That's where I need things to be orderly.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: A tidy fesk

My desktop has a lot of folders and files on it.

That doesn't mean they're not orderly (or not entirely disorderly). For instance right in the middle is a link to the 1st Ed 6" OS local sheet with links to the N, NE, E, S, SW and W sheets appropriately arranged round it (SE corner has a link to the local sheet of the Jefferys map and the NW to a C18th copy of a local medieval map. Centre top is a folder synced to a Nextcloud folder which is also synced with a folder on my wife's laptop etc.

Stuff I use a lot stays there where I can find it quicker than having to go through a hierarchy on Dolphin. The KDE desktop, along with others, was designed to be used to put stuff at the fingertips of users who chose to use it that way. When you see stuff on other people's desktops, don't assume it's just lying around.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: A tidy fesk

the stuff that comes back from butchers' shops is usually the wurst.

[Anonymous Coward]

Tidy desk: sterile mind

[Bebu sa Ware]

Tidy desk

> Tidy desk: sterile mind

Often the case if the mind is still present in some form.

Tidy desks don't necessarily mean the occupant doesn't work but invariably does indicate a notable lack of thinking about the tasks they are attempting to complete.

The untidy desk is often contains in the piles of paper the information collected over time to solve a number of so far intractable problems placed on the back burner pro tem.

I typically had a months worth of paper sitting in various pile on my desk around the keyboard with the wired mouse on or in the piles of paper.

Even if it accumulated three months worth I could usually find a document within seconds (pile, depth adressing.)

One of my earliest bosses had several years worth piled with his keyboard and monitor in a canyon of paper; he still used an rs232 dec vt terminal and printed most documents (pre MS Word days, a Unix site and he used vi+troff.) In minutes he could locate documents from years before - close on 10 years prior in one case of a report on a feasibility study he had completed then.

[M.V. Lipvig]

Close to what I've always heard - empty desk, empty mind.

[ColinPa]

I have a Software equivilant

Customer says "This fix does not solve our urgent problem". We went back to review the original problem, and were convinced the fix should work.

Two days later we went back to the customer.

Us:"How big is the executable you are using"

Customer: 222222 bytes

Us: Well the fix is 333333 bytes

Customer: ah. (pause) AHHHH we didn't copy the fix across. Sorry!

[Phil O'Sophical]

Re: I have a Software equivilant

I think we've all been there, I know I have.

[Aleph0]

Re: I have a Software equivilant

Oh yeah, and with the dubious distinction of having been on both sides of that conversation (at different times obviously ;) )

[Joe W]

Re: I have a Software equivilant

I guess that number is higher than you'd expect. Not neccessarily file size only but other markers, like patch level version numbers or the positions of certain design elements, or whatever.

[PM.]

Re: I have a Software equivilant

So true, I am never snarky when the other side is offender

[Philo T Farnsworth]

Re: I have a Software equivilant

Hm.

I quite frequently find I'm talking to myself.

[Philo T Farnsworth]

Re: I have a Software equivilant

Geeze, this is the story of my life -- wiggling the wrong mouse, fixing the wrong problem, tugging on the wrong connection, you name it, if it has wrong in it, I've done it.

Just yesterday I was installing a new machine in my office and kept trying to drag the cursor from one screen to another, constantly forgetting that they were connected to two entirely separate machines.

Then there's rebooting the wrong system because the mouse accidentally got moved from one window to another.

If I had a "battle cry," it would certainly be "AAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!"¹

__________________

¹ At least that's the version I'll use in polite company.

[dmesg]

Re: I have a Software equivilant

Depeche Mode, Wrong. (Ddgo search result link avoids ads).

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=fpas&q=you+tube+depeche+mode+wrong&ia=videos&iax=videos&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DRQz3hTUWl6E

[The Oncoming Scorn]

Re: I have a Software equivilant

I have 3 work stations on my desk, one is for the main PC, two are for imaging purposes (With KVM's).

I have a single Logitech K850 keyboard that's paired UNR that is set up to work on each imaging station, along with its counterpart & similar featured mouse while keeping a dedicated HP mouse for my main station), well I did until some thieving git (Icon - Manager) stole it.

At least once a day I typing into the wrong machine or pick up the wrong mouse happens at least once a day.

[Bob Royal]

Multi screen desk

Running 5 bi-input screens to 3 PC rigs leads to cabling torture.

Regular VGA & DVI as well as home-made long VGA (can't find ready made with all the right wires),

long DVI-D, DVI-D to HDMI, HDMI couplers, HDMI to HDMI, the lot.

1 rig runs 5 screens, other 2 run 2 & 3. Sometimes leads to keyboard/mouse confusion? YES

nVIDEA/Nouveu PHOOEY. AMD Radeon rules.

(5 screens for lillyPond/Frecso Baldi. Just the job.)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Multi screen desk

You can get multi-screen KVM switches now. Also things like matrix switches so you could switch any input to any output. Lots of scope for simplifying and confusing at the same time!

[Conrad Longmore]

Filth

Back in the old days, employees were allowed to smoke if they had their own office. Some of them smoked like a chimney, so the computer equipment would be coated inside and out with sticky nicotine residue which could not be cleaned off. Anything that came out of these offices had to be thrown away, if we ended up even touching the equipment we'd smell of cigarettes all day. Vile.

[jake]

Re: Filth

Back in the old days, everybody smoked, everywhere. It was disgusting. I have done work in offices where the tar and other combustion products were literally dripping down the walls and/or windows.

[disgruntled yank]

Re: Filth

In the 1980s, a friend said that he liked runners' parties: an hour after one started, you could still see across the room. It was true that a gathering of runners could be counted on to be non-smoking, and that a miscellaneous gathering could not.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Filth

Until the indoor smoking ban came into force my working habitat was usually labs which were intrinsically non-smoking. Later a client wanted me to stay overnight for a meeting with one of their clients. They booked me into a non non-smoking hotel room. That was disgusting.

[Andy A]

Re: Filth

Once had to upgrade some WinXP touch screen machines used by reps of a tobacco company. We set up in one of their store rooms, thankfully without the stuff they sold. Large "NO SMOKING" signs were erected.

Luckily the reps must have been warned to keep their machines clean, so there was only a thin layer of tar involved. The gloves were still an important Health and Safety measure though.

[lglethal]

Re: Filth

Neither of you get an up-vote, purely because I dont even want to touch your comments... :P

I've been in those offices and all I can say is Urgggggghhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I am so glad those days have gone...

(Icon because seriously some of those offices deserved it...)

[Caver_Dave]

Re: Filth

I have a smoke allergy and last century I did walk into a customer's office building and turn straight around.

I told them that the office was unhealthy for humans and computers alike and that I was cancelling my support contract with them.

The IT person, volunteered from the general workforce as he had a home PC (I said it was last century), agreed and we parted on good terms.

[The Oncoming Scorn]

Re: Filth

Two tales spring to mind:

Field call (& on the way home) UK school, kid had violently lost his lunch over his keyboard, on arrival & handing over the new unit.

"Do you want the old one?"

"The WEEE can take a running jump this time, I don't want it stinking out my car especially overnight"

"Fair enough"

Oil pipeline company in Calgary, replacing a PC & keyboard. All I can say the owner was "bit mining" in his nostrils on a industrial scale & the waste material was coated as a "film" & obscuring all the characters on the keys.

[Lazlo Woodbine]

Mouse downgrade

I think I've told this one before...

I arrived at my desk one Monday morning to find my Microsoft mouse (the best MS product IMO) had been replaced by a brightly coloured object, a very old child's mouse, so old it terminated in a RS232 plug.

The first job was to find an RS232 to PS/2 connector, then a PS/2 to USB, so I convened to the comms room to have a dig through the cables and plugs boxes.

Having found the necessary adaptors, plugged it into my PC and set about my day. Amazingly the mouse worked, mostly.

It needed a good clean before it moved smoothly, and the wiring was screwed in one of the adaptors, so the left & right buttons were swapped, so I had to change the settings in control panel.

The colleague responsible for the swap was duly astonished to find me using my new mouse when he arrived...

[druck]

Re: Mouse downgrade

No mention colleague responsible having an unfortunate accident later that day?

[xc8]

Re: Mouse downgrade

I would "fix" that colleague by remote login on their pc then delete some random files from the system folder

[Lazlo Woodbine]

Re: Mouse downgrade

As I was Azure AD admin at that place, I was tempted to do some damage to his AD account...

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Mouse downgrade

"an unfortunate accident later that day"

Not that day. Let them fret for a while.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Mouse downgrade

Swapped left and right buttons is not a (cable) wiring issue.

I may have spent too much time analysing the mouse communication protocol.

[Michael H.F. Wilkinson]

I started using a (very nice) trackball (Focus 2000, if memory serves) instead of a mouse, because the trackball stayed put, whereas mice tended to (a) escape under various piles of papers, sundry tools, and books on my desk, and (b) when found, did not really have enough clear real estate on the desk to quickly go from one side of the screen to the next.

I have bettered my ways since then (although the missus might say otherwise)

[PCScreenOnly]

I switched to Logi ones year ago when I had so much kit and other kit appearing on my desk that any kind of space was an issue.

I had a KVM which helped, but the fact a trackman and obviously a keyboard can use used anywhere, anyhow just suited.

Never gone back even though I no longer have that issue - though at times if I need to use my left hand to drive the mouse for whatever, that is a problem (spare standard mouse out for those occasions)

[The Oncoming Scorn]

My left hand is my daily driver for mice, as I'm sort of ambidextrous, while I use Logi Mice at home anything like a MX Master isn't at all comfortable, but a MX Anywhere is fine.

[M.V. Lipvig]

The best one of those I ever used was a thumb ball. Super accurate and much easier to use than the "universal" trackballs with the ball centered.

Best mouse I ever used was a kid's Crayola pen mouse. It too was super accurate and felt natural to use since you held it like a pen with the buttons next to your index finger.

[H in The Hague]

Fire hazard

Chap I used to know was apparently v untidy at work. One of his colleagues mentioned he visited this gentleman in his paper-strewn office and when the phone rang he couldn't find it to answer it. Allegedly some time later his office was condemned as a fire hazard.

[dmesg]

Re: Fire hazard

In my second year at college one of the gents in the (single-occupancy room) dorms had a room that was quite literally buried in several inches of detritus of college life. Laundry, papers, books, probably a few pizza boxes. I was told that his previous room had been the same, and to move he just shoveled the floor into trash bags and dumped them in the new room. Ugh.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Fire hazard

"when the phone rang he couldn't find it to answer it"

Find it to answer it isn't usually a problem. In fact getting somebody to ring it is a recognised way of finding it in order to make a call.

[Michael Kean]

Reminds me of an old bash dot org quote.

"<erno> hm. I've lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to ping, it works completely, I just can't figure out where in my apartment it is."

[Anonymous Coward]

I joined a company a good few years ago where the incumbent IT tech's method of replacing a broken mouse was to take a working one from the desk of someone who was on holiday. Partly to avoid doing the job properly, partly from a bizarre pride in not spending the (very profitable) company's funds. We didn't get on.

[JWLong]

AAaaaaHHhhhhhh,

The stories I could tell from working bowling centers in the 70's, 80's, and 90's.

The purple haze that would float above the lanes by nights end, and then to add in computerized scoring systems into the mix was something to be amazed by!

In those days Trichloroethylene (TCE) was your friend to preclean boards prior to repair. I had an ultrasonic cleaner in the early 80's that held 12 gallons in it to clean boards with before they even hit the repair bench.

Those were the days my friend!

[Boris the Cockroach]

Why cant I

get this damn moniter to work?

Its powered up... the pc is powered up reboot reboot aarrghghghghhgh. followed by any amount of fault finding on my PC

Then it dawned... I never wired these things up... and yes my VGA lead went into the back of my colleagues moniter on the other side of the desk.............................

[Medixstiff]

My first job was building Whitebox PC's back in MS-DOS 6.2 and DR-DOS days when the first SoundBlaster single speed CD drive kits came out. Back then you had to install the power supply and plug the connectors into a switch at the front of the case.

I remember one guy plugging the connectors in, but he had also plugged the PSU in, so when he pushed one of the connectors in using long nose plyers, there was a flash and the pliers were welded into the aluminium front shell of the case.

The team leader was quite impressed with these pliers hanging out the side, everything was a write off, which was only just the case and PSU, which back then was two thirds of SFA cost wise.

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely dos 6.2 was more around the windows 3.1 period.

I probably still have copies of install disks for dos 6.22 and windows (for workgroups) 3.11

I have not so fond memories of CD drives at the time especially with their looks like IDE but isn't interface (MKE / Panasonic / Creative)

[Santuna]

Lost the keyboard

Not long after we moved to hot desking, I took a call from a user whose laptop had started acting oddly after being plugged into a docking station. Being the grizzled support tech that I was, I was soon working on the theory that there was something wrong with (or sitting on) the desk's USB keyboard.

But no, said the user, there was no such keyboard attached to the dock. He was just using the laptop's keyboard.

OK, it was entirely possible that someone had walked off with the keyboard that should have been there... but if so, what was the issue? I asked the caller to follow the cables.

And he found the keyboard, sat in the filing tray with a heap of papers on top of it.

Problem solved.

[Stuart Castle]

Years ago, I worked in a Uni computing lab. We had some high end (for the late 90s) tower PCs dedicated to video editing. These were all SCSI.

They had dual Pentium IIs (IIRC) and tons of ram.

One day, one of them had developed a fault, and to keep in practice, my boss decided to strip the PC down and rebuild it. He did this, checked it and as fair as he could see, it was correctly set up.

So, he plugged it in to the mains, hit the power button and the ribbon cable connecting the primary hard drive to the SCSI interface on the motherboard (yes, they hand on board SCSI, which was unusualy for PCs) caught fire.

We think he'd plugged the ribbon cable in so that it was one pin up from where it should have been. Either way, both Motherboard and hard drive were toast. That was an expensive repair.

[Yes Me]

Can't parse

"Steve's had been using the new mouse..."

Steve's what? Steve's who? Or were there two Steves and a grocer wrote the story?

[collinsl]

Re: Can't parse

I think they intended to mean "Steve's problem had been..."

[nonpc]

If I run out of floor space doing a pile sort it confirms that the tidy-up is overdue.

There was a wonderful description of my desk management system using the volcano approach - a crater at the top where the 'dealt with' stuff was, with the lesser items flowing lava-like down the sides.

[FeRDNYC]

Never done THAT...

But I have experienced the ultimate frustration of having two computers on my desk at the same time.

(A particular circle of hell where life becomes one near-continuous, protracted groan of irritation at the constantly-repeating realization that you're typing on the wrong keyboard / holding the wrong mouse for the system you want to be interacting with.)

That's why I won't do it anymore. If more than one system is going to share my workspace, then either the additionals all have to be headless and remote-access only, or everything need to be attached to a KVM. Maximum one mouse and one keyboard per workstation. Because I don't have enough sanity left to play games with what remains.

[Robert Carnegie]

I'm having trouble following the story... let's see if I've got it: the new mouse is on the desk, but isn't working; the old mouse lead is being plugged and unplugged uselessly; the plug for the new mouse is what is hidden under the PC's casing - or under the separated lid of the case?