So I'll try to keep this one short. I used to work as a software engineer at a shady startup. They were one of those "work hard, play hard" places, I guess, but I won't get into that.

Basically, everybody in the office had wireless mice (mouses???). One day I was trying to figure out what I think had something to do with Lightning Web Components (the Frontend framework used by Salesforce).

So I'm just sitting there and suddenly, I can't move my cursor. I try all the usual things, like turning it on and off again, unpluggin the receiver and plugging it back in, switching ports, etc.

But I realised that nothing works. So the logical conclusion I came up with was that the mouse's batteries were cooked. So I come up to my team lead asking for new batteries and he says "Sure, accounting has all the spare batteries". I was relatively new, so he took me to the accounting people, through the snaking liminal corridors and shady spaces.

Anyway, I got the batteries and when we came back, the mouse still wouldn't work. I played around with it some more. Then I realised that all this time, the mouse light was still working fine, even with the old, supposedly drained batteries.

Then the rest of my neurons decided to start working and I realised my PC was a laptop, so I could try using the touchpad or keyboard.

Neither worked.

I then understood that something completely different happened. Something I didn't expect to happen to me in this day and age. I thought this was a relic from Windows XP times, but what it turns out "My computer just froze itself" still happens today.

So basically I restarted the computer via the physical button and the mouse, of course, started working, old batteries still perfectly operational.

So I kept the new batteries to spare myself the humiliation, but from now on I'm not as skeptical when people say "I don't know, it just stopped working on its own".

So yeah. I don't usually post here, just lurk. But this time I had to do it. Because I was the user.