Only caught the tail end of that era, so elementary school. Probably some kid did, but I never heard about it.
this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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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.
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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 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.
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
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.
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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.
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
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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.
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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.
We didn't steal the balls, but where computers were back to back we'd swap the mice over. Cue much confusion for the next class when the pointer seemed to move on it's own. Fun times.
At one of my jobs a guy ran the speaker wires from the adjoining cubicle in and out of his own computer so he could mix things into the other guy's audio, mostly music and talk radio, at very low volume so it sounded like random stray signals. Took the guy like a month to figure out what was going on.
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I would just open them up and tape over one of the little wheels inside, then put the ball back in.
You can do the same thing with an optical mouse.
https://images6.memedroid.com/images/UPLOADED3/515b47490eeda.jpeg
When I worked for a big IT consultant, the internal marketing department (why does that exist?) was tasked with promoting a new touch device. They had the genius idea of making stickers with "The mouse is dead" and a product link. Early one morning, they went around to every desk and put these stickers over the mouse lasers.
It took about 30 minutes for everyone to figure out why every mouse in the building had stopped working. There was urgent work that had to be done. People were furious.
That's an impressive display of marketing prowess. You'll never forget it, regardless of how stupid it was.
The brief era? It was over a decade of people stealing mouse balls! And once optical mice started showing up people would steal the entire mouse because they were new and cool!
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If that happened today, everyone would blame TikTok.
By the time I hit grade school the balls were outdated. So I missed out on this. What I didnt miss out on was finding a broken (exposed) usb stick and when I would plug it into a computer it would shock me a bit and the computer would shut down. I felt like I had the ultimate power in my hands
I definitely disabled a few school mice back in the day.
neutered
My school "solved" this problem by letting students use 386 with DOS, Turbo Pascal and Lotus 123 until the early 2000s, when optical mice were available.
Jesus, I was using Turbo Pascal in the 80s. Had no idea it even still existed in 2000. Flex: I wrote my own BBS in Turbo Pascal and ran if for a couple years in Portland - Tomb of the Unknown Modem.
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