A Transparent Solution

I am a senior tech with a popular personal computer company. As a senior tech, I deal with a lot of escalation calls. One day, my team lead comes over and puts my phone on “aux,” meaning that when this call finishes, I won’t be getting another one. After I complete my call, he comes over to my desk.

Team Lead: “I’m sending you a call from an irate customer.”

No shock there.

Team Lead: “They have replaced his mouse twice and his PC once. He has just finished his third reload and it’s still messed up.”

Me: “What’s the actual issue?”

Team Lead: “His cursor is jumping all over the screen when he uses his mouse.”

I take the call. First off, I give the standard apologies. Then, we go into Device Manager and look for splats (marks indicating errors or conflicts). He’s having a hard time negotiating cause the cursor keeps jumping around. No splats. We check current driver versions. We reboot into safe mode. But he’s having the same issues.

We reboot with the mouse out and plug in after. No change. We delete mouse drivers, disconnect the mouse, and reboot. We plug in the mouse and load drivers. The cursor is still jumping all over the screen.

At this point, I’m at a loss. As I’m trying to think about what to do next, I hear a, “click, click, click” from the customer’s end.

Me: “What’s that sound?”

Customer: “Sorry, just tapping my pen on my desk.”

I can barely suppress the grin on my face. I feel like laughing out loud.

Me: “Do you have a glass desk?”

I ask, although I already know the answer.

Customer: *Frustrated* “Yes.”

Me: “Take a piece of printer paper and set your mouse on top of it.”

Customer: “Okay, now what?”

I can tell he’s losing his patience.

Me: “Try using your mouse.”

A moment later…

Customer: “OH, MY GOD! YOU FIXED MY COMPUTER! You’re a miracle worker!”

I explained that he had an optical mouse and the beam was being scattered by the glass desktop. That’s why his cursor was jumping around. All he had to do was put it on something NOT GLASS for it to work properly.