My latest purchase in the category of “things I don’t need, but go ahead and buy on eBay without telling my wife first” is an optical mouse. To be precise, I bought a “Microsoft IntelliEye Optical Wheel Mouse”. In case you don’t know, an optical mouse is a mouse without a ball. A few years ago, this would have been called a “broken mouse” rather than an optical mouse. However, not even I am dumb enough to buy a pre-broken mouse. I much prefer to break my own computer hardware, thank you very much.

Luckily, the brilliant mouse scientists realized that if they took the ball out of a mouse, they would have to replace it with something. The first thing they tried, crunchy peanut butter, didn’t work out so well. Personally, I think those guys just liked to put crunchy peanut butter on stuff. But hey, I’m not judging anyone. As long as nobody gets hurt, right?

They had better luck when they sobered up and used a tiny camera, and so the “optical mouse” was born. Thanks to these courageous scientists, many of whom live with their parents and have trouble getting dates, you can now have a mouse with no moving parts. OK, I guess the buttons do move a little bit. And there is that little wheel-thingy on top that spins. You’d have to call that a moving part. And technically the whole mouse is a moving part, but you know what I mean.

Maybe you have an optical mouse, and you don’t even know it. Boy, are you dumb! And who picked out that shirt you’re wearing? Anyhow, if you’d like to see what kind of mouse you have, pick it up and turn it over. Now, look closely…do you have a boy mouse or a girl mouse? Hah hah! Just kidding, there. Now put your mouse back down your perv!

You may be wondering what I can do with an optical mouse that I can’t do with a regular old ball mouse. Well, here’s just one example: I can…um… Oh yeah! It has a cool red light on it! And not only that, but you don’t have to use a mouse pad with an optical mouse. Wow, will that be liberating! I can now roll my mouse around my desk without worrying about whether or not there is a mouse pad underneath it. Ok, my particular mouse pad has a really cool wrist rest built into it, so I’ll probably keep using it. But I don’t HAVE to use it. Take that, you giant international mouse pad conglomerates!

In closing, I want to point out that I just wrote an entire humor column on the topic of “mouse balls” without making one cheap testicles joke. That took a lot of…courage.

by Joe Shockley, January 13, 2001