Hello, Tech Support?

This is a picture of my keyboard and the two mice (mouses?) that I switch between using.

The mouse on the left came with the computer and works fine, but its short cord easily gets tangled on the corner of the mousepad. (In the interest of full disclosure, I removed the mousepad before taking this photo, after suddenly realizing it's dirty to the point of being disgusting.)

One day Kim heard me muttering under my breath at the mouse, and the next day she brought me a wireless mouse she wasn't using. That's the streamlined little "rodent" on the right in the photo. The wireless one aggravates me, too. I can't seem to remember to turn it off, so it eats batteries.

None of this has been a really big deal until one day last week when the corded mouse fell off the back of the keyboard tray and hung there for a minute, after which it didn't want to work anymore. (It has since miraculously recovered.) I did everything to it I could think to do in the course of about a minute, then switched to the wireless mouse.

The batteries were dead.

I changed the batteries and tried again. Kim had told me more than once that it takes a moment for the computer to recognize the wireless mouse, so I waited until the mouse pointer appeared on the screen, then I was ready to get back to business. Except I couldn't.

The mouse pointer was at the very top left of the screen, and when I pulled back on the mouse to try to put the pointer on my text, the pointer stayed at the top left of the screen.  I made repeated backward motions with the mouse, and the harder I pulled back, the more the pointer bounced and clung to its position. It was as if the little arrow-thingy was fighting me.

I was already frustrated, and then things got even crazier. As I set the mouse back on the pad, it slid slightly forward. The pointer fell to the center of the screen. Hm. Progress, I thought. I pushed again, and it fell lower. I moved the mouse to the right, and the pointer moved to the left. I zigzagged the mouse back and forth, and whichever way I moved it, up, down, right or left, the pointer moved in the opposite direction. It was bizarre!

A seed of an idea popped into my mind. No, I thought, it couldn't be that simple. I took my hand off the mouse and took a good, hard look at it. You see that little medium-grey apple near the bottom of the mouse? When I looked closely at the mouse that day, that little apple was upside down near the top of it.

Maybe I should stick with the corded one.

Someone told me once, "You're book smart, but you have no common sense."  I feel  highly indignant when I remember that remark, but I have to wonder if there isn't some truth to it.