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Indeed, it seems that technology advancements have pampered us all too much.

Take the optical mouse, for instance. Now, you can move that little cursor on your screen so freely, without the need to yank out the balls (har har har) of your mouse ever so often to get rid of the dust within.

I salute the optical mouse. It’s made my life so much easier ever since I got my first one in … 2005. Suddenly, Photoshop seemed three times easier to use, especially since I don’t have to CTRL-Z as many times when I do my illustrations and whatnot because that stupid ball within the mouse refuses to move again.

Perhaps this perfectly explains why I was practically tearing my hair out at Sakae Sushi this evening.

Some background knowledge. Sakae Sushi is a chain of restaurants located predominantly in Asia, serving sushi of all sorts at cheap prices. (At least, they claim to make sushi affordable – but with the recent price hike, I am starting to have my qualms.) The outlets provide computer screens with an attached mouse at every table from which you place your orders.

Apart from having to deal with the occasional soy sauce soaked mouse, and perhaps the mouse which has had its inner mechanisms completely whacked out by the previous occupant (most probably a kid!) spilling water all over it which I encounter ever so often – I also have to deal with the old, traditional wheel mouse.

Yes, the wheel mouse.

With the ball within.

I am guessing that they chose to stick with the wheel mouse because the mouse was in the shape of an adorable green frog which matched the restaurant chain’s logo really closely, and perhaps there was no optical mouse in a similar design.

But what’s the point of having an aesthetically pleasing wheel mouse, especially when the ball within simply REFUSES. TO. MOVE?!?

That wheel mouse was practically as useful as … a male mouse without any balls. (Err, okay. Corny, I know. I couldn’t think of anything better, considering all that is in my head now is nothing but mice, mice, mice.)

Oh, and the frog-shaped wheel mouse had two big eyes – which were actually the control buttons. And I found it extremely disconcerting to punch my fingers directly into the eyeball of a frog, real frog or not.

In a nutshell – placing one order of salmon sushi involved twenty slams of the mouse on the table (to dislodge the ball from it’s stuck position), another twenty attempts to move the mouse at least one centimetre (that’s the maximum the mouse will move before it gets jammed again) and countless frantic punching of the eyes … err, buttons.

–Facepalm.

Someone should declare the wheel mouse a lethal weapon. It drives people mad.