Jumpy Mouse, Grumpy Boss

My first real job was as a web guy in high school. It wasn’t anything fancy. I just knew how to do a few things in Drupal (an open-source web content management system written in PHP), and the small company my mom worked for hired me to maintain their site so they wouldn’t have to pay the company that made the site a few hundred dollars every time they wanted to update the text or something. It seemed like a great job; I was getting paid above minimum wage, and as it was my first job, I was really excited.

I quickly learned that the boss and owner of this small company (about ten employees) had the most narcissistic personality I’ve ever encountered. She lived in this weird, delusional world where nothing was her fault, and when something went wrong and was clearly because of her, she just went silent.

As the only computer-savvy person, my job quickly went from updating web pages to solving all the issues, which I was fine with. I even automated a few things, setting up a file-sharing server so they didn’t have to keep running flash drives back and forth, which everyone loved.

But there was one moment in particular that really stuck with me. It really showed my boss’s faults. She had just purchased a brand-new laptop and had been using it for a few days. She kept complaining that her mouse would jump all around the screen for no given reason. I took a look at it and it didn’t seem to be doing anything weird, so she thought I had fixed it.

When the problem kept happening, she b****ed at me that I intentionally broke it to make her frustrated, but I assured her I hadn’t done anything. (She watched me the entire time I was looking at it.) She kept complaining about it for a few days, until one day I heard her scream (and I mean SCREAM) like a toddler down the hall. I walked down to her office.

Me: “What’s the issue?”

Boss: “My mouse is jumping around the screen again!”

I watched what she was doing, and sure enough, the mouse was jumping around. Then, I noticed that her fingers were hitting the touchpad while she was typing, making the cursor move out of whatever field in the Excel document and click on a different cell so her typing would be all over the place.

She insisted that was not what was happening, so I took a coaster (like what you put a glass on) and set it on top of her touchpad. She started typing and the mouse stopped jumping. She didn’t say anything. I would have gone through the settings to disable the mouse while typing, but she never really let me.

After I stopped working there, she emailed me every once in a while asking if I could update her site again, for free. I just said I was too busy with schoolwork. I noticed recently that the site domain is for sale, so I’m guessing she went out of business.