Many people (including me) depend on a mouse, day-to-day, hour-to-hour, as necessary equipment to do their jobs well. In a way, people with desk jobs are professional mouse-operators. And yet, many of us spend the majority of our careers without putting a lot of time into the choice of mouse we work with. We tend to put up with subpar, budget-priced mouses, that employers provide by default.
Yes, mouses. I’ll pause here to emphasize: the plural of mouse (rodent) is mice, and only mice, but the plural of mouse (computer accessory) is mice, or “mouses”. Your choice.
As The Word Counter explains, in their comprehensive article about computer mouse plural forms:
“Since the computer mouse devices are named after the typical small rodent house mouse with a long tail, it ends up with the same irregular plural form “mice”, however since it is also an invention and doesn’t have to follow the root language rules for making a word plural, the other correct (less frequently used) plural form is mouses.”
As you can see, I’ve been getting pretty crazy this weekend, reading up on office supply etymology. I don’t know about you, but I think this is fascinating stuff; the implications are astounding. If we can make computer accessory that resembles a moose, or a goose, then we could, in addition to whatever practical benefit such and invention would provide, have the wonderful side-effect of normalizing plural forms “mooses” and/or “gooses”. So let’s get to work on that.
I digress. Where was I? Ah yes, too many people spend eight hours a day, five days a week, working with sub-par mouses. The mouse is the primary tool for humans to interact with their computer - it’s the computing equivalent of the steering wheel, brake pedal, and accelerator on a car. Would you want to drive a car with a cheap, hollow, plastic steering wheel, and rubbery, unpredictable gas pedal? No! You want those controls to feel great and work great; especially if you were a professional driver of some sort.
For “white collar” workers, this is the one, lone, single, physical tool with which we need to actually have some sort of refined skills. It’s like the trusted hammer, screwdrivers, and wrench set, that turn a mechanic into a master of his craft. Or the knives, ladles, and pots the gourmet chef uses to magically turn a thousand ingredients into a savory triumph of the culinary arts. Or the scalpals and medical equipment that become life-saving gifts in the trained hands of a surgeon.
I’m sorry; I do spend a lot of time working with mouses, so maybe I’m getting a little carried away with emotion. It’s been on my mind in particular, of late, because I spend half the week working with an absolute atrocity of a mouse. My employer, in their infinite wisdom, has provided to me, a guy who just works in Excel all day long, with an elderly, terrible, cheap mouse at the office. It’s so old, it has an actual cord on it. It’s made of a low grade plastic, and feels awkwardly hollow in the hand. The scroll wheel is tiresome to use, and imprecise. The clicking mechanism on the buttons is finicky and inconsistent. It looks like it came bundled free with a tower computer, CRT monitor, keyboard, speakers, and printer, in a back-to-school special at K-Mart. It is total trash.
And I’m not even getting into the health/ergonomics side of this; that’s a whole other rant. I’m just talking about the build quality of the mouse, and how well it facilitates moving a cursor around a screen. It strikes me as ridiculous that companies give their employees such garbage equipment to work with. It’s just one more reason why I prefer working from home, with my own equipment, including my luxurious, premium mouse.
Full disclosure, I could, I’m pretty sure, make a request for a better mouse, and my manager would certainly approve of that. There’s a whole process in place, and it works pretty well. In fact, I might do that tomorrow. When I mentioned earlier that too many people spend eight hours a day, five days a week, working with sub-par mouses, that was my own call to action.
I would have requested a new mouse at work earlier, but then I’d have had nothing to write (complain) about tonight. So I hope you’ve enjoyed this mouse rant, and I’ve convinced some of you to also ask your managers to upgrade your mouses. And make a point of calling them mouses.