Maintenance/Mouse button replacement: Difference between revisions

I'm your ordinary sort of office worker, one who types and clicks far too often in the course of a day as if this digital thwacking were my only form of exercise.  Various body parts connected to these devices are getting old and very much appreciate the mid-range ergonomic keyboard and mouse generously granted by my employer.  Office workers of the world, you are advised to ask for at least this much.  I think I'm emotionally attached to these toys, perhaps it makes me feel fancy that someone once spent a hundred euro on my well-being.  Or maybe it's that one must perform one's longevity as the job becomes a career, like a delivery driver who hangs a pair of fuzzy dice over the rear-view mirror, or an academic whose bookshelf holds all the back issues of a professional journal.

The mouse trouble began when I moved into a "home office"—the mouse lives on a homemade standing desk not much bigger than a cutting board, screwed to the wall at navel height.  This is the perfect height for extremely destructive impact of any plastic-encased electronics unlucky enough to fall to the floor, and small enough that this happens often.  My mouse has suffered and its once-noble exterior is held together either by gravity or by a small number of the original fasteners. But it still clicks!

At least, it clicks most of the time.  Once I noticed the issue, I entered the denial stage of grief and I just clicked harder every time.  The charade quickly wore thin.  Where this kind of inconsistency really starts to burn is double-clicking, an ableist-enough exercise under normal circumstances but a fool's errand with iffy buttons.  For the past year, I thought I had worked around it by software-mapped the right and left buttons to switch them, and I hold the mouse in a funny way which lets me imagine that everything is fine, sort of.  It's also causing my habits to cross-wire, and anyway I find that the right button becomes increasingly important in proportion to how much I can't use it.

Maybe I could find another mouse but its manufacturer cleverly built it as a bundle with the keyboard.  These and the USB dongle are a happy little nuclear family yet nothing but e-waste if separated. I'd really like to make the mouse work again for the sake of the planet if nothing else.  It's a heap of junk to produce and reproduce if really necessary.