Rodent Infestation

5/27/06


Sometimes tiny portions of my life make me doubt that I'm as smart as I think I am. I don't see how this could possibly be, but judging by this most recent idiocy, it's an outside possibility.

I've been meaning to replace the mouse for my laptop for a long time. I loathe those little touchpad things with a passion that can only be equaled by my distaste for people who pronounce "wash" as "warsh." ("Whered the extraneous "r" come from, dick-hole?!" I want to shout...) Anyway, the mini mouse I, until recently, had for my laptop was a constant source of humor and verbal attack by my girlfriend Hanni, notably because it was the size of a peanut M&M and the buttons weren't actually attached to it so much as they just rested atop the device ever since an unfortunate incident with gravity. Oh, and sometimes it was sticky, which always led to horrified expressions from whomever used the thing. The stickiness was due to the fact that the padding near the base had peeled away and fallen off, but this explanation was always met with some skepticism; you could almost see the person imagining that I had some kind of sick techno-fetish involving a compulsion to ejaculate onto computer equipment.

Last week I somehow lost the buttons to the mouse (don't ask, I have no friggin' clue; they just disappeared one day. I think it was elves) and was thusly forced to procure a new one. How exciting! A new, fully-functional mouse! Or so I thought.

I purchased a fancy new wireless, optical mouse from Wal-Mart during a routine shopping excursion to replenish my supply of liquor, tobacco and food stuffs. Fairly wetting myself with anticipation, I came home and promptly discovered that there was a very good reason this mouse was such a good value. Namely, whenever the software was installed and the hardware was plugged in, it didnt so much work as sit there and make a very nice paper weight attached to my laptop by a thin tether. After two hours of toying with various options and genuinely insane thinking such as "maybe if I install the program then turn off the power without shutting it down it'll workor, OR, I could uninstall the software, beat the CD within an inch of its life and cry myself to sleep...."

On top of that the packaging had neglected to accurately show the enormous plug-in attachment that would be forever dangling from my laptop in order to make the wireless mouse work, sort of negating the convenience of a wireless mouse in the first place. I guess for $20 you can't really expect one of those fancy numbers that only require the addition of a tiny jump drive in the USB port.

Brashly ignoring the natural, complacent energy-conservation which has served me so well thus far, I waited only two days to return the mouse for a refund, after which I purchased just your normal, run-of-the-mill, meat-'n-potatoes chorded optical mouse. Surely this time there would be no problem.

WRONG! Wrong, ass-face! Upon removing the mouse from her packing like a giddy child on Xmas morning I discovered something that caused my aura to go from swirling shades of pink and lavender to ropey tentacles of black tar the likes of which you might expect to see wafting from Satans asshole. Unbeknownst to yours truly, I had picked up a mouse that had gotten lost in a time/space wormhole. This is the only logical explanation for the fact that the device did not have a USB connector on the end, opting instead for the much less viable, circular plug-in not routinely seen since the time before Christ.

All of this madness probably could have been avoided had I taken the time to actually read the box instead of just taking it for wrote that the manufacturer would produce an item commensurate with the turn of the new millennium, but Im not about to start living like a savage and reading instructions before whipping out the debit card.

Seeing as all this proactive, going to get things taken care of instead of just sort of hoping that something would fall into my lap has gotten me nowhere, I'm considering just taking my roommate's mouse and swapping it for mine, since he has a desktop computer which, like a vestigial appendix, still possesses an old school mouse receptacle. I'm sure he'll never notice the switch, you know, aside from the fact that tomorrow his mouse will suddenly be straight out of the Stone Age and carved from whale bone.


___________________________




And what the shit is with Lara Flynn Boyle? I remember a thoroughly enjoyable if mediocre film called Threesome from 1994 in which she was a cute little number barely hinting at the anorexic, Skeletor-look she would be sporting in a few years. Tonight I was flipping through the channels and ran across Las Vegas on NBC, to which Ms. Boyle has apparently joined, complete with lips that look as though inflated by a spastic with a bicycle pump. Is she nuts or something? Jesus. She looks like The Rocky Horror Picture Show logo balanced on a popsicle stick.