Memories of a bygone era

Not to mention scraping all the gunk off the rollers.
- All the human slime is just between the buttons now and never gets cleaned
  
  Lies.
  I clean it every two years!
- we always sprinkled paprika on ours.
  
  Mine were so overcooked, they tasted like cooked rubber :(
- It was always so satisfying to get it off in one single strip
- I was working in a facility with about 400 desktops when we made the move to laser mice. I remember it fondly. Cleaning was worse than the theft, but both were obnoxious.
  
  Oh god we were such shits in junior high. Throwing them was great fun because they hurt like hell. I witnessed a kid throw one out a window and crack the shit out of a teacher's windshield. Why they never just put short flathead screws in I'll never know, that would be my solution.
  You got me nostalgic thinking of junior high. If there was a hell I'd never redeem myself through good deeds. We'd pack bags full of lunch food and drop them 4 floors down the stairwell where they would explode spectacularly. We got our milk in bags, so we would strategically place them around the school to rot. They got so swollen it was outrageous. When they popped it was like a grenade of putrid stink, about two or three weeks later. If you wanted one to pop faster you could hide it behind a radiator. Projectiles made of paper clips that would legit fuck you up when fired from rubber bands the right way. You could also bite the corner off the milk bag and throw it like a grenade. Oh man and you could put like a carrot or mashed potatoes or beans into a corner of the milk bag and smash a fist on top to shotgun it everywhere. Milk bags were versatile.
  I was a piece of shit, but this was what I got up to while being severely bullied, there were worse kids.
- Oh, the "hand cheese"

how about having to glue the bottom on hundreds of mice so school kids dont steal/throw them at each other.
- core memory unlocked
  also using hard drive magnet to discolour CRT screens
  
  Back in the day we would prank each other by flipping the 120\240 switch on each other's computers so that they wouldn't turn on. That kept going until someone did it one too many times and freed the foul smelling machine spirit.
  
  And the satisfaction of a good degauss afterwards
- Were you the admins at my grade school? Because I may or may not have been responsible for that....

I remember being in 4-5th grade and learning about graphs. Specifically x & y coordinates. One day while cleaning the mouse ball before playing Joust or whatnot I noticed two little geared spindle thingy's. I vividly remember it clicking that those gears were translating the physical mouses x&y to the screens cursor's x&y.
- this is how most of us learned computer right? You want to play something, it doesnt work or only partialy so you open it up and learned how to fix shit.
  
  That's my problem with Apple. They hide all files, treating is as a magic box with an incredible search function. But it prevents the user from understanding, and thus learning.
  
  If by "us," you mean Millennials, then yes.

You're all liars because no one has mentioned the smell.
Use common sense! You think nerds changed their egg out on time?

I gave my technically illiterate father a led mouse for Christmas just as they became the normal, and it was like a miracle to him.
- I read that lead, gotta finish my coffee...

I still use a trackball, so I still have to overcook egg yolks weekly.
- i use one of those trackball mice with the ball on top. first time i tried it i never went back, no need to worry about having a proper surface or desk space for a mouse ever again. if you reach the side of your desk using an optical mouse, you have to pick the mouse up and move it all the way to the other side of the desk, while is a proper ball mouse (a good one without too much resistance) when you flick the ball it can continue spinning a bit even as you release it, so you can flick it to the side and then bend your wrist slightly to then flick it again, and the mouse cursor will just continue moving without stopping, which in games you can do this to have endless turning around, when turning is always stuttery on an optical mouse due to hitting the end of the desk. it takes a little bit to get used to, but at least a good one with limited resistance and a large ball, you can easily get just as accurate as an optical mouse as well. the only downside i find is that i do have to take the trackball out and clean it like the ones on the bottom.
  
  You make good points and it's very rational, but for some reason, having used an optical mouse for most of my life but also knowing what a trackball is like (but just not being used to one, it accounting for like 0.005% of my mouse usage or something), I just...
  
  Can't see myself playing FPS without a trackball. You can also use lower mouse sensitivity for higher accuracy, because you can flick. If you don't like that all the time, there's also good old Wolfenstain Enemy Territory trick where you bind the trigger button to drop your mouse sensitivity for that easy headshot.

This meme is just wrong
An egg that large is for a trackball.
You need to hard boil a quail's egg for a mouse.
- When you're right, you're right.
  They're not cheaper though, due to the relative supply shortages.

Or to even clean the innards of a literal computer mouse. 🤢
- Scratching those little rollers took ages.
  
  But it was so satisfying when all the dirt and dust came off and your mouse tracked like brand new again.
  
  Ah, the amount of pubic hair and dried cum that got scraped off those by teenage boys, the memories.
- Or degaussing a monitor... Let it build for a week or two and get that extra satisfying fumpfvvvvvvvvvsssssssss
- This and defrag are like 80% of my childhood memories.

Lol I used to take the balls out as a prank, see how long the teacher would wiggle it and check the cable before they flipped it lol.

anyone remember that brief period before led mice got good, where you'd have to SLAM the mouse in a direction to get it to comply?
Rubber mice, that was a given sometimes, but led mice had the same issue for a bit
- Yes exactly this, though I'm not sure if it was just a habit from using rubber mice
- Not sure I've experienced that, early led mouse always seemed to fail to track at the speeds I like to swipe.
  
  hence the slamming!

I worked for a computer store in the 90's. The owner got the contract for all the PC's in that part of the state in schools. One school was constantly calling about the mice not working. We would show up and start replacement them and those little assholes would be throwing the balls out of them across the room before we finished replacing them. We started using epoxy to seal them in. They would get gummed up bit it wasn't our problem.