Man, that's a blast from the past! I had completely forgotten about that until I saw this post!
I wouldn't say I 'stole' them necessarily. But me and my buddies did used to take them out and hide them near the desks as a prank.
this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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Ooh, ooh...I did that.
I 'member
Yeap, I was one of those students, they arw super fun to just throw along the floor as they had a metal core, was heavy and went on and on forever
Today students pick keycaps off of keyboards and steal anything not tied down (so instead of just the ball, the entire mouse gets stolen). Once I heard a student ran off with an entire side panel of a computer
Good to know every generation is progressively more enlightened than previous ones, just like I keep reading on social media. All the world's problems should be solved any day now lol.
The keycaps thing is a huge problem now because of the widespread use of Chromebooks with butterfly switches. 9 times out of 10 if one of those caps is torn off, the switch is permanently damaged and the whole keyboard needs to be replaced.
Nope. Way back in the day turning the brightness on a monitor completely down was the big prank. I do remember cleaning my mices balls and I did not relish that. When optical mouse came down in price I bought one for every family member.
Until reading this, I had forgotten that mouse balls were even a thing.
No, when I was in school no computer had a mouse except one Mac in my English class.
Yep was one of these kids... From the very same period, removing 10base2 BNC terminators was also a fun thing to do. Both had the effect to infuriate the computer science teacher...
Thanks for the collection of all this...
(later it was the deadly loop on network hubs and tcpkill... all this is impossible now)
Yeah, I always tried to use them as a pencil eraser. They were never very effective but I still always tried.
I actually don't remember any of my school computers having ball mice. They all only got their computers in the late 90's and had optical mice by then.
But I can imagine; my high school was savage.
Dunno if was my parents or genetics or what, but as a kid I never had the urge to do stuff like that. My impulse was make up funny stuff. The idea of breaking or ruining something seemed bad to me. So if I had gone to school in the age of computer mice I would have been pissed off if some kid disabled the mouse. It didn't bother me when my friend tricked the voice synthesizer at the science center to repeat "Fuck you, fuck you..." but I would have called him an asshole if he poured a drink into the keyboard.
This thread makes me wonder if there will always be a mischief factor. Even if robots do all the work and we can have anything we want for free, will people still want to fuck shit up just because they can?
Even if ~~robots~~humans do all the work and we can have anything we want for free, will ~~people~~cats still want to fuck shit up just because they can?
Absolutely. If humans disappeared for two months every object in the world would be on the floor. Then cats, having fulfilled their mission, would suddenly vanish in a puff of loose hair.
Yes, yes I do remember doing that. Not just at school. Use to do it to dad. When he was being annoying sometimes.