9/21/2004 - Carpal Tunnel

I realized today that programmers like me are the very first breed of human to have used a mouse for as long and as frequently as we have.

I don't mean the rodent, you twisted apes, I mean the computer pointing device.

I first used a mouse in the mid 80's, pre-PS/2 mouse. Oh, and back then, PS/2 stood for Personal System 2, not PlayStation 2. Yes, boring, I know.

I'm going from memory with no fact checking, and I really don't care about the facts anyway, so please don't correct me, but the first mice required expansion cards, with interrupt switches and all that stuff. Hence, very few people had them except for me and my goober computer friends. Actually, we were more C-64 nuts than IBM, and it was more joystick on the C-64.

Side Note: Joystick is the most disturbingly named computer peripheral of all time. We'd tell our parents that we wanted a joystick for Christmas, which would leave them speechless. "What is a joystick? Is my son gay?"

At any rate, we started using mice in the mid 1980's, which puts us right around 20 years of actively using a mouse. I've recently discovered that many of us are suffering in silence, with a ticking time bomb in our wrists.

I get soreness in my mousing hand. Every woman I've dated in the past three years knows that there is one thing that pleases me to the core in a way that a belly rub does for a doggy. Rub my mousing hand. S***n, the day before I left her, sat with me in a movie theatre rubbing my mousing hand. To this day, that is on the list of my fondest memories of any woman.

I asked a coworker today if he had experienced the same thing (soreness in the mousing hand, not having my ex-girlfriend rub his hand). He said, "Oh, yeah. Sometimes, it's really bad and painful. I'm just going to ignore it."

Sounds like a plan. Computer guys aren't known to be real militant. At least I know I'm not suffereing alone, I guess.