Technological Spite

I bought this “MX Master” shilled mouse for Mac because I’m a disgusting iToddler and whatever. Almost two years ago.

I bought it and it works for the most part. Well, except for the fact that the left click — that is, the primary function of a mouse — broke after a year. Maybe even earlier. I’d get phantom left clicks half the time, before mostly nothing.

No worries, I installed their soon-to-be-SaaS configuration dashboard that logs everything I click on and rebound the “forward” button (the one that sits on the side of the mouse, allowing you to go forward/back on the browser) as my left click. This works for the most part, except some system level tasks Mac has a hardware requisite: it has to be the original left click.

So I sit there and click the left a hundred times until by some magic it allows me to drag files around, allows me to make a screenshot. It’s hard to say how often I have to do this. It’s hard to say why I didn’t buy a new mouse as soon as the left click broke.

Well, actually, it’s easy. Because I want at least two years worth out of a mouse. It cost like a hundred bucks. I’m not going to immediately replace it afterward. And besides, if something fails after a year, don’t you feel like a shmuck buying the exact same product?

There’s no other mouse on the market that has these conveniences baked in (namely, I bound the “thumb” button to middle-click zoom so I can easily zoom in and out instead of straining eyes. The ease by which one can zoom on the touchpad is unmatched, but this is the closest you can get. In fact, I’d argue this is even more convenient for those who are so inert and drooling scratching their stomach and legs propped up along the standing desk, which, yes, I did stand and I’ve been standing for the last week but something clicked in me and now I’m sitting because my shins were killing me and nothing is more appropriate than to have your legs crossed on your table and all it takes is pressing down a thumb and pushing the mouse up or down to zoom).

Anyway, that’s actually a lie: there probably are mouses on the market but I am too lazy to find them.

So as of today I am now used to clicking everything with my Forward Button on the mouse. What am I clicking on? Hard to say! Perhaps highlighting a sentence as I read, the same as you’re doing right now. I’ve advanced a monkey rung with my custom binds.

The right click eventually stopped working too. I would, again, click the right a hundred times hoping somehow it works for whatever system function. For some reason it took me four months to eventually rebind the right click to the scroll button.

It works, but somedays I doubt my spite in living with defective hardware. But you can always find a lot of good reasons, weirdly.

The penultimate being you don’t even want to be on the computer anyway.