Beware of Piles

The mouse I was using at the office had a rather difficult-to-press mouse wheel, which became a big problem when I switched back over to doing more Unix development, since it’s used so often for pasting. Fortunately, like any good IT department, we have a big pile of spares to choose from.

Unfortunately I didn’t notice that the first one I took back to my desk had a *completely* broken scroll wheel — it couldn’t be pressed in at all.

I double-checked to make sure that the second one had a good feel to the click before taking it back to my office. It wasn’t until about 15 minutes later that I noticed that whenever I switched to one application, one of its subwindows would always scroll to the bottom of its list of items. I tried to scroll back up in it, but it immediately went right back down again. Turns out that its scroll wheel was reporting as if it was constantly scrolling downwards, no matter what I did.

So, back to the pile for another replacement. Fortunately this one worked well; the wheel clicked nicely, and scrolled properly. Except that over the course of a few hours, it became apparent that the wheel’s click might be a little *too* sensitive. Wheel movements meant merely to scroll would sometimes inadvertently register as a click, pasting whatever junk I happened to have in the clipboard right into the middle of some source code.

I’m still not sure there’s a single good mouse in that pile…