Mini hands make light work

This pilot fish is doing support work for some local schools where something odd is going on.

"I kept getting calls from one particular classroom in an outlying school," says fish. "The children were having trouble getting the computers to respond to the mice."

So, time after time, fish goes to the school the next morning to check out the problem. Fish cleans the rubber balls and rollers in the mice, checks the computers and makes sure everything is working fine.

But the calls keep coming in -- even after fish swaps in some new mice that test out perfectly.

An answer doesn't come until one day when fish is running late and doesn't get to the school until midafternoon.

The room has always been brightly lit by the overhead fluorescents. But this time, it's ablaze with sunlight from the south-facing windows.

"Sure enough, the mice were erratic unless I covered them completely with my hand, blocking the direct sunlight," fish says. "The excessive light was confusing the photoelectric sensors that translate the X-Y motion -- but only on bright sunny days or if they didn't have the blinds closed!

"I took the mice, disassembled them and coated the inside of the beige plastic with black paint. That fixed the problem, and we have since replaced the mice with black plastic ones to avoid future calls."

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