Eric Gunnerson's C# Compendium : Tricks you can play on yourself, #35

Eric Gunnerson had a little trouble with his keyboard today.

This is nothing. Nothing. I have had a user report to me, on two occasions, that her mouse was putting garbage and gibberish on her screen in whatever window was open at the time. "My mouse is broken!" she lamented. "I move it around and all of a sudden what I'm looking at vanishes and my screen just starts filling up with garbage, or the cursor scrolls to the bottom of the page and keeps going and going. I'm not just losing my mind: Jessica was here, she witnessed it happen." I go to investigate.

When I get to her office, she is prepared to show me. I stand at the side of her desk, ready to observe. She just reaches over her keyboard and starts moving the mouse around trying to reproduce the problem. She reaches across her keyboard because, for whatever reason, she has positioned her mousepad on her desk behind her keyboard.

You see where this is going. I saw where this was going. If you have pets, you can hold them up to the monitor as you read this, and odds are good they'll give you an understanding look. Even they see where this is going.

She starts movin' the mouse around. I don't even bother watching her screen, or checking the connection on the back of her machine. I simply ask her: "Where is your hand right now? Or should I say, where is your hand in relation to your keypad right now?" She turns pink with embarrassment. That gibberish? They were numerical symbols. Plusses and minuses and lots and lots of newlines. All things that are found on the numerical keypad of just about every keyboard in America. She'd been using her own keypad as a wrist rest and it didn't even fucking occur to her.

She'd been having the problem for about a week.