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...)
this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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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.
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.
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.
Only caught the tail end of that era, so elementary school. Probably some kid did, but I never heard about it.
If that happened today, everyone would blame TikTok.
I 'member
TIL kids would steal these.
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.
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
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
We used to huck em at each other's nuts
Never change, kids
There are no winners in a game of Ball Ball
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!
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?
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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
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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
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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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!
i did this everywhere i went it was so amazing
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 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.
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.
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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.
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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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I definitely disabled a few school mice back in the day.
neutered
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