Dunno what made me think of this just now. When I worked for IT in a school district way back in the 90s, a librarian told me she kept a supply of mouse balls in her desk because kids would steal them out of the school computers. What I remember about those balls was they picked up dust and crud off surfaces. Pretty soon optical mice came along and they were history.
Only caught the tail end of that era, so elementary school. Probably some kid did, but I never heard about it.
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I remember doing work experience at school in the computer lab. Thought I was gonna learn fun stuff on the servers, ended up cleaning gunk from the rollers if every mouse in the entire school (And cleaning every PC out, and flashing entire labs one by one with updates OS…)
I worked for my district’s IT department when I was in high school. I think my sophomore or junior year.
It was pretty cool really. Mostly it was transcoding VHS tapes into MPEGs, but occasionally I got to do odd jobs around the school district.
Once I got yelled at by a grade school secretary, and treated with suspicion even after she had called my boss at the district IT office to confirm I was indeed there to replace a graphics card on a computer.
While she was walking me to the library or classroom or whatever she took the box from me, pointed to the 3D orc on the box, and said in the bitchiest possible tone, “So what is this? Is this supposed to be part of the curriculum?”
I calmly said, “No ma’am, that’s just the advertising the manufacturer puts on the packaging. It’s a graphics card, it can be used to play games so they advertise that.”
“Well kids shouldn’t be playing these kinds of games in school!”
“It’s a graphics card. It’s how the computer displays any kind of graphics on the screen. The computer needs a new one. I don’t know why, I’m just doing what I was told.”
Man that woman was so much of a bitch I remember that interaction better than most of high school.
My library made us take the balls out and give them to the librarian when we were done with the computer.
We used to huck em at each other’s nuts
We used to huck em at each other’s nuts
Never change, kids
There are no winners in a game of Ball Ball
Turns out you could use an xacto and carve the rubber coating off and the steel ball was a perfect fit for a paintball gun. No winners had there.
Jesus, could that actually kill someone?
Nah, it didn’t have enough oomph to break skin but it left nasty bruises. It could have claimed an eye or teeth though
I only did it once, because I hated the teacher and I guess I thought that would send a message. I was immediately caught and the kid who saw me pocket it kept saying I “liked mouse balls,” so it really backfired pretty spectacularly.
We had to flip the mouses around at the end of every computer class so the teacher could check all the mouse balls were still there.
Yup. I was a nerd who got to go inside and boot up the computers and set them back from what the kids had done the day before every morning. Warning sounds with SNL skits were popular at one point, as was messing with the icons.
It was instead of standing outside in the cold wet concrete courtyard for 20 minutes before the first bell.
First job was turning the mouses back over (the were left balls up at the end of each class).
Out go to prank was a shut down bat file, disguised as GTA.exe. We used to put that in a shared folder and waited for other students to shut down their computers.
Ha, these were early Macs (right at the launch of System 7) there was only a few kids with these at home so I had a pretty good idea who was brining in the icons and sound files (aiff if I recall correctly). We had one at my home too btw. They were interesting computers but besides shareware and a couple game companies, they were abysmal for games. We did get a copy of Warcraft 1 and could play it over 14.4k directly dialed to the other computer lines with PC users.
Yep. We took them out because we thought they would bounce (they did not). But they were hard AF so we’d just throw them at each other during recess.
I was in highschool at this point and I totally would have ratted any kid out for that.
No mouse balls would mean no Quake or StarCraft in the lab after school… Unacceptable!
… bring your own mouse. keep it in your locker. your parents are at work. your siblings are at school. it’s nbd.
No but i had a habit of cleaning the lint and gunk off the rollers of every mouse i touched
The best was when you got a “full peel” from a really dirty wheel without it breaking into pieces.
Doing God’s work!
In my school, the teacher’s computer had software running to remotely control the student’s computers, lock them or see a mosaic of all the student screens to make sure they are doing what they should be doing.
Except, the computers were all run with admin rights and you could just open the task manager, kill a couple processes, and the remove software didn’t work.
We always said it just must have been buggy software.
Sorry Mr. W. You were one of my favorite teachers, but that secret had to be kept a close secret between students
For us it was putting a space in the username field of the login screen, and then moving the cursor back to the start of the field.
The username field wouldn’t reset on a failed login attempt, only the password field did. So users would do a visual scan of the username field, confirm that’s correct, assume they miskeyed when entering their password, try again, rinse and repeat.
That and rotating the desktop, switching the keyboard to Dvorak, etc
That’s a good one.
We used to screenshot desktops, set it as the wallpaper, and move all the desktop icons to a temporary folder.
I’ve heard swapping the N and M keys is a good one because it doesn’t register as unusual on a visual scan but messes up touch typists.
I remember the teacher calling out “I cant see your screen” constantly and for unfair reasons, on chromeOS you can (frequently on accedent) abuse the security systems made to limit the damage of rouge extensions. Mainly the “no screen sharing on chrome:// and file:// tabs pages”. I also found a glitch that got patched to run the browser part on a higher privlaged UID (possably root? somthing related to OOBE? the lock screen itself? IDK). It was unstable, dangerous for the OS itself and could go to any site you wanted, this account had a blank chrome://policy and no extensions so anything was fair game. That got patched fast tho. My small group of friends still got to keep their chrome://flags changes even after the patch.
Those balls were nasty as fuck. I remember when I was like 13 and the mouse at my dad’s pc wasn’t working right. A friend recommended cleaning the ball…it was disgusting.
Crazy to see this in my feed, I was just thinking about this the other day. I didn’t steal the balls, but I remember figuring out that I could remove them and clean the crud off of the rolling components inside to smooth my cursor movement. (This would have been 3rd or 4th grade.)
Kids these days will never know the satisfaction of opening the bottom, removing the ball, and then taking an unfolded paperclip to remove all the built up crud and hair on the components inside. I would do this anytime I was left alone in my mom’s office while she had a meeting or something.
Ha, it really was satisfying!
Youre mom probably wondered why her mouse started working smoother.
I always keep an old toothbrush in my pencil cup for cleaning the mouse contacts. I dont use a mouse, I’ve always used a track ball, and now and then you have to pop out the ball and clean the accumulated crud out of the contacts.
i did this everywhere i went it was so amazing
I was working with some younger people a few years back and one of them noticed that all of us from of a certain generation always slam the mouse down whenever we first use it. I explained it’s a reflex from when the wheels inside the mouse would get stuck with gunk and we would instinctively slam the mouse to get them free.
Wow
I haven’t used a mouseball mouse since i was a kid but your description brought back a visceral memory of doing exactly exactly that.
Ouch felt that in my old bones.
Another habit I noticed was lifting the mouse so the cursor stayed still on screen, and putting the mouse down on the edge of the mouse pad, so I could move the cursor further on the screen without going past the mouse pad.
A quirk that’s eliminated nowadays thanks to mice that can adjust dpi on the fly, but I still catch myself doing this paintbrush like motion once in awhile.
Haha holy shit, this made me realize I do that all day everyday. It really is a reflex from the 90s and serves zero purpose.
i was on the other side… i’d spend the first five minutes scraping all the finger shit off of the rollers every day.
I forgot all about scraping those little rollers with my fingernail! It was strangely satisfying.
and super gross when you think about it…
The gunk is just compacted dust from the desk surfaces.
Perhaps a bit gross, but it’s mostly stuff you’re breathing in daily, just now visible due to being compacted.
Super gross to me would imply something like bodily fluids or other biohazard.
Am I missing something?
i think you’re missing the part where a lot of that gunk is exactly bodily fluids and other biohazards lol
How so? I’m not coughing or spitting on the desk.
Dead skin cells, sure, but that’s not a biohazard.
you’re gonna be REALLY grossed out when you find out what’s on your toothbrush…
That’s why I don’t keep my brushes in the same room as my toilet.
The majority of dust particles on the surface of your desk is dead human skin cells. That’s the part you’re missing.
So touching dead skin cells with my skin is supposed to be a biohazard?
First time I hear that.
I guess I also shouldn’t shake hands anymore.
