Left-handed mice

I was plugging a new mouse into my laptop yesterday – I’m VERY old school – when it suddenly occurred to me that I automatically put the mouse on the right-hand side of the screen … and I’m left handed.

Using the mouse with my left-hand would seem … weird … and awkward.

The topic took me down a long rabbit hole of contemplation before I finally realised the bleeding obvious: I put my mouse on the right-hand side so the left-click button is positioned on my index finger side. I must have subconsciously made the decision years ago to accommodate the left click button being the most frequently used one.

Left handers do this sort of thing frequently because we’ve learned to be ambidextrous in a right-handed world.

The revelation took me right back to year 5, when cranky Mrs Watson tried to make me switch from being left handed to right handed.

She must have been very old school to be pushing that bias in the 70s. I would have thought people knew better by then. Earlier in the twentieth century it was pretty standard for teachers to smack or verbally abuse kids for using their ‘devil’ hand.

As Wikipedia notes: “Owing to cultural and social pressures, many left-handed children were forced to write and perform other activities with their right hands. This conversion can cause multiple problems in the developing left-handed child, including learning disorders, dyslexia, stuttering and other speech disorders.”

I paid absolutely no attention to cranky old Mrs Watson and her ridiculous desire to make me write with my right hand. I thought it was illogical and I’ve never held much truck with illogical stuff, even as a primary schooler …

Thinking about that takes me back to my first memory of how illogical the English language can be. I was mortified to fail a reading test in year 2 because I couldn’t pronounce “choir” correctly. Whoever decided something that looks like “ch-oi-er” should be pronounced “kwire” is a sadist.

I vividly remember how outraged I was by the trickery. Words had been my thing from a very early age and I had been determined to ace that test.

I survived the indignity and went on in year 4 to be nicknamed The Walking Dictionary by my teacher. Then I left high school and scored a journalism cadetship. And the rest, as they say, is history.

But to this day I still have trouble with words that don’t sound the way they look. If the youngest hears me call an acai bowl and ak-ay bowl one more time I think she will disown me.

But I digress …

Since about 90 percent of the world’s population is right-handed, I suppose it makes sense that most mice are built to accommodate them and not us lefties.

Despite the right-handed bias of many everyday tools, I am very happy to be in the minority when it comes to my dominant hand.

There are lots of studies that have concluded cool things about people who are left-handed, such as that they score higher when it comes to creativity, imagination, daydreaming and intuition.

They are also said to be good at complex reasoning, resulting in a high number of lefty Noble Prize winners, writers, artists, musicians, architects and mathematicians. According to research published in the American Journal of Psychology, they even appear to be better at divergent thinking.

Go us!

Oh, and finally, just to gross you out … I also discovered while searching for an image for this post that there are taxidermy websites that show you how to turn an actual mouse into a computer mouse.

Er, no thanks.

I am figuring no one who reads HouseGoesHome would want to do that so I’m not including a link. You can Google it if you are curious.

Oh, and in one last moment of randomness … I was very proud in primary school to have my initials emblazoned in gold, stick-on letters on my Globite suitcase: AMH.

Until the “A” fell off and I gained the nicknamed “Mouse House” (MH).

If you went to primary school with me, sent me a Facebook friend request that hasn’t been accepted and called me Mouse House, mystery solved.

Song of the day: Mi-Sex “Computer games”