Software update turned my display and mouse upside-down, says user Welcome again to On-Call, The Register's weekly wander through readers' recollections of tech support traumas. This week, meet “Alan” who once had a gig as “both sysadmin and developer in charge of an image analysis system linked to microscopes for analysis of bacteria in a University hospital.” “These systems consisted of a …
Ummm, the story (sorry, article) said the mouse tail was pointing towards the user. Which doesn't just necessitate relabelling the buttons, it involves either pressing them with the palm of your hand (damned near impossible to operate a two-button mouse correctly that way) or taking your hand off the mouse to use them.
The Reader's stories of their sexual conquests, sorry, On Call articles, of the old days were much more plausible. We don't swallow just anything...
it involves either pressing them with the palm of your hand (damned near impossible to operate a two-button mouse correctly that way) or taking your hand off the mouse to use them.
No, it involves moving the mouse with your fingertips, with your palm on the desk (in our colleague's case, at least. Can't speak for the user mentioned in the article). Actually given how we get told to use trackballs instead of mice because RSI, it might be better, come to think of it.
I'm ambidextrous with mice and tend to use them right handed at home and left handed at work. For a while in a previous job the other two developers were both left handed but one used a right hand mouse with standard buttons, the other used a left hand mouse with reversed buttons and I used left handed mouse with standard buttons. The mouse on servers was hardly ever in the right place when you needed to fiddle, but it was easy to tell who had been fiddling last.
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Yeah I mostly use the mouse in my off (left) hand, without switching the buttons. It takes very little time to get used to.
I do this because I often work with a steam-driven paper & pen on the right side of my machine, on the grounds that while I can use a mouse left-handed I need to write right-handed.
TBF it does lead to some grumbling and noisy "putting the mouse back on the correct side" from other users in the house...
Our occupational nurse advised that the mouse should be used with the opposite hand to that which is your dominant keyboard hand. There was some RSI reason I think
More likely it's a pornhub reason. If you're using your dominant hand on the joystick then the other hand has to operate the mouse.
YMMV. (your masturbation may vary)
I'm right handed but switched to using left handed keyboards 15+ years ago, with the keypad on the left the mouse sits closer to the centre and that was enough to stop my mouse RSI. Wish I'd bought more of the keyboards, down to just 1 spare and changing keyboards is a chore, especially ones with different layout.
I've not tried the two mice, one computer trick, however I do have two mice on my desk - one to the left of my keyboard (I'm left-handed), which is the one I use for most things, one to the right, which is connect to a Mac that I use for a couple of Mac-only applications. It's always amusing to watch people move the wrong one, and wonder why nothing is happening.
Incidentally, my ex-girlfriend is right handed but uses a mouse left handed - back in the early 90s she was used to using only a keyboard (she had a PCW8256 at home, and her work terminals really were terminals), and when she started using my computer with a mouse, naturally it was on the left side of the keyboard, and that's how she got used to using it.
Another right-handed user who uses the mouse in his left hand here.
It was out of self-defense: my right hand was typing, using the keypad, and moving the mouse, and my hand hurt. Moving one of those tasks (the mouse) over to my left hand reduced the stress on my right.
It only took a day to get used to it. I didn't bother to switch buttons as I didn't want to bother switching them back if someone else was in the driver's seat.
"I can see why you're called Pompous Git...Apple mice have only one button. I have two Logitech and one MS mouse here that have a scroll wheel, but no buttons as such. Like Nick Kew who comments elsewhere in this thread, the use of a mouse did not come easily to me. It's also worth noting that while it's amusing to watch a mouse-user manipulating a stylus and digitiser for the first time, I would never mock, or humiliate them. YMMV...Left and right click must be odd if you use the mouse backwards no?"
@pompous git
I don't mind you taking my name in vain, but it seems I may have given a misleading impression:
Like Nick Kew who comments elsewhere in this thread,
I didn't say I had difficulty, merely that I had to figure it out. I don't think it took more than a few seconds. I think we were both saying the same thing: it's not entirely obvious how to hold a mouse until you've tried. Not everyone has the mindset to figure such things out.
As it happens, twenty odd years on from that first exposure to a mouse, I did experience difficulty using one, due to an RSI. So I learned to use a mouse left-handed. That took a bit of effort at first: a little more than, say, switching between left-hand- and right-hand-traffic.
@Nick Kew
Funny video. Makes sense even though I don't speak Norwegian.
Made even more sense because I had the type of mindset that pays attention to minor details and allows me to figure things out. Did you link to that particular upload of that sketch to see how many people had that sort of mindset? Or did you just not notice the version with English subtitles?
Carrying out a remote session on someone's machine where the mouse is configured for left hand use is brilliant. You don't realise how often you click (left or right) without thinking and trying to do this conciously with a 'backwards' mouse is really hard, especially when you don't have the visual clue of the mouse being on the other side of the keyboard.
Left and right click must be odd if you use the mouse backwards no?
Nopes, she's used to it. The wheel isn't a problem either, as more and more people are used to scrolling the "wrong" way due to touchscreens. No, the weirdest thing (to me) is the direction of the moves. I mean, OK you can train yourself to move right to go left but she's equally fine with touchpads, which go in the "right" direction. Oh well. As long as the works gets done, there's no wrong way to use your tools, I suppose.
Nominally I would agree, however I ran a migration of legacy Z/OS keyboard driven dumb terminals onto NT4 as late as 2005. Besides everything that is wrong with that statement, a significant number of older employees had never picked up a mouse before; and that played a major part in persuading management that it was worth including Solitaire in the build to teach basic mouse skills.
I started with teletype terminals on a DECSystem 10 - on a flexy floor in Digitals Maynard HQ (old Civil War era woolen mill. Floors were independently suspended so the big weaving machines didn't transmit vibrations between floors. It was very soothing - as you got into the right rhythm the machines would start rocking back and forth, encouraging you to rock back and forth yourself. When a heavy cart came down the hallway, an up and down motion was introduced, amplifying as the cart neared, dieing down as it passed. I kind of missed that as the VT30 (with the "gunshot" carriage return) and the VT05 terminals came out.
It sounds like a very inexperienced microscopist. The image in the eyepiece is upside down already.
I used to help out as a demonstrator for a pollen analysis course (not my job but there weren't enough of the regular staff with the knowledge). This was the first time in about 2 1/2 years into a degree course that students had had to set up a microscope for maximum resolution; at least it felt like that. So they were shown how to set up the Kohler illumination etc. You could guarantee that the first thing to do when called over to help with an identification was to set the microscope up properly, even if you'd done that only a few minutes earlier.
When I was the technician in a medical teaching lab one of the (many) things I had to do was look after 90 microscopes. You don't want to know what atrocities students can perpetrate on microscopes. Amongst other things, we had to call in the Leitz engineer to lock the lenses in place (he actually tightened them up supertight with a pair of rubber-coated pliers) to stop the students nicking them. And these were medical students - supposedly the creme de la creme.
Ah the 70's I miss them sometimes.
"we had to call in the Leitz engineer to lock the lenses in place"
Back then even the sales guys were techies. We had one new microscope, actually the new top-of-the-range job, as a loaner to try to sell it to us. The objectives weren't par-focal. One was one of the 0.95 NA Plan Apo dry lenses so that couldn't be touched, but when the salesman rolled up and we told him he took the 10x out, adjusted the internal components to fix it and locked them in place with a smidge of SWMBO's nail varnish.
"to stop the students nicking them. And these were medical students - supposedly the creme de la creme."
I was in Halls with medical students - it brought an air of reality to any subsequent dealings with the profession. The Leitz salesman left a sample of a new Fluroite 0.90NA with us on approval one time which I've still got somewhere. It wasn't a patch on the Plan Apos. They didn't want it back, I think it never went into production.
A fair chunk of my working life was spent looking down Leitz microscopes. Beautiful pieces of kit.
I had a similar issue, working in a different industry.
I used to install audio equipment in customers homes and in most cases, I never saw the customer again.
However one married, mature lady customer was bought a hi-fi system by her "often-away-from-home" husband and I was called back on numerous occasions, when her lack of technical "nowse" caused the system to stop working.
As a young male in my early 20's, it was an interesting experience, going to her home and "fixing the stereo"...
BTW: her name wasn't Mrs Robinson ;-)
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I also worked in the same field. A previous employee of the company I worked for had been charged wit rape by a customer who changed her mind after he had left.
I therefore had no interest in taking up any of the offers I received.
Anybody who visits a customers home and indulges in anything untoward take note.
I am just reminded of some traps us programmers set on some DOS machines. We were testing some code to write our own interrupt handlers, especially for keyboard and mouse event handling (early days, few useful libraries about), and to trap interrupts generated by some real-time data acquisition hardware we had made. Just for laughs, we wrote a little program called CRASH.EXE. This simply redirected interrupt 9 (keyboard) to our own handler, which did nothing, whatever key was pressed. After that, it printed a helpful message on the screen that your system had crashed. Pressing ctrl-alt-del didn't work, of course, so a hard reset was the only option to get out of the situation. Given that MS-DOS was single-tasking, this never resulted in data loss or anything. We put CRASH.EXE among the other executables of our users' systems, and it was instructive to see how almost all users were sufficiently inquisitive to see what command CRASH would do. As a result, I could pose a simple question to many users who came for assistance to "uncrash" their machines: "What did you THINK crash would do?" Inaudible mumbles were the usual replies.
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I was involved in writing a Windows install program to replace the previous DOS one. It was controlled by parameters in a text file. Thus it was quite easy to produce a version offering four items on the menu:<P>
1) Install a bug<br>
2) Install a virus<br>
3) Perform a random action<br>
4) exit<p>
Regardless of which one was pressed, a dialog box appeared saying "Please wait while Windows deletes your valuable data ... "<p>
As could be expected, a salesman took my machine to use for a demo while I was not looking.<p>
After that, my computer tended to stay where I put it!
"What did you THINK crash would do?"
For a certain significant portion of the population, the monkey brain comes to the fore. Wet Paint? Really?
Properly directed of course, they may become brilliant scientists, but most will be the type that presses the big red button marked Do Not Press!
Reminds me of the time when I was working in a studio on Mac II's.
I hooked up a spare mouse up to a colleague's spare ADB port and removed the track ball. Over the next couple of weeks, I drove him absolutely wild by occasionally sticking my finger in the carefully hidden mouse and giving one of the rollers a little spin to send his pointer up or down the screen. Not helpful when you're trying to use Adobe Illustrator.
Needless to say he went absolutely MENTAL when he found out. Fun times...
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