Comment by unsupp0rted
2 years ago
I'm amazed an IT department would troubleshoot deeply enough to figure out it was the thin plastic letting in interfering light on sunny days.
I would have guessed they'd shrug at the first sign of trouble, swap it out with a known-working mouse and mark the ticket resolved... unless all the replacement mice were thin plastic too, I suppose.
I can't leave something like that unexplained, and I've been an IT department before.
It would bother me until I figured something out.
I'm assuming it was a trackball mouse from the description. The OP said it was cheap so I don't think cost was an issue but from my experience some employees are very particular about their peripherals (don't blame them one bit!). If they're important enough (or maybe just nice enough) I could absolutely imagine spending the time to make sure their preferred device is working properly.
Mice used to be expensive enough to troubleshoot.
For myself, I can't remember a time when a mouse cost more than an hour of an IT guy's time.
I suppose a good office-computer mouse in 1990 would cost $100 ~ $200 (say $350 today). In that case, yes troubleshooting it for a day would make sense, especially if it's not an isolated problem.
> For myself, I can't remember a time when a mouse cost more than an hour of an IT guy's time.
This is not a sensible comparison to make. Support staff have a lot of free time. They have to, because they're support staff -- if they were always busy, then whenever a problem arose, it would be impossible to get support.
So to have the IT department playing with the mouse is unlikely to cost the company anything. If something comes in that's more important, the mouse problem will be put aside. If they have nothing better to do, they can play with the mouse.