A Real Life Catch-22
Posted by DannyJul 24
As I sat in the airport waiting for my flight to stop being so god damn delayed, I wanted to play some poker. However, I couldn’t play many tables because I forgot my mouse, but I wanted to possibly two table sit and goes. Since the airport connection was really bad, I wanted to use my phones connection through tethering. The problem was that I needed to right click on the easy tether icon in my shortcuts bar to connect. The problem with that is my right click doesn’t work on my touch pad because of a freak pepsi spilling accident (okay, maybe not freak).
What I did next was the stupidest thing I have ever done in my life.
I went to touch pad settings and set my left click button to perform the right click function. It seemed like a good idea. I would simply right click on the tethering short cut to connect to the internet, and set the setting back to normal when I needed left click. But when I tried to execute my plan I was met with one complication: I couldn’t set my left click back to the left click function without using left click. It was the best real life catch-22 I have ever come across. In order to restore the functioning of the left click, I needed to left click.
I called Dell Support actually excited to present them with this quandary because of the seeming impossibility of solving this issue without an external mouse. But apparently since my warranty is expired, customer service will cost me $40. I didn’t accept the fee out of principle, and because I felt there was a chance they wouldn’t be able to solve the problem in a reasonable amount of time. So I called my most computer savvy friend I knew. After about 20 minutes of talking, we decided there were 3 possible ways to fix the problem.
- Attach an external mouse. Since I only changed the setting for the touch pad, this of course would work. But in a small airport there was no place to buy a mouse, nor people with mice in site.
- Use a left click hot key. He did not know one and could not find one on the internet. Simply tabbing to the appropriate button and pressing enter or + did not work in this case.
- Open a program that allows someone to take over my desktop and change it from his computer. I had such a program, but was unable to open it, and was unable to download a different one, because I couldn’t left click.
I told this story because I found it to be funny but it almost seems like a computer experts riddle. Is there anyway I could have fixed my computer without an external mouse?
3 comments
Comment by shakesss on July 27, 2010 at 10:41 am
you could have used the keyboard shortcuts to get to the place where you could change back your settings to the old ones. Like tab and enter can get you into control panel quite easily. If you do not know keyboard shortcuts then your computer savvy friend would def know..
Comment by gmml on July 30, 2010 at 10:05 pm
haha! i lol’d at this.
yeah, you could have just used the keyboard to navigate.
Comment by Bob on August 26, 2010 at 3:28 am
Just stumbled upon this, but there might be a button on your keyboard to effectively bring up the right-click context menu. There’s one on my keyboard (it’s a desktop though) and it’s to the right of my spacebar, between alt and ctrl. Next time you could try hovering your mouse over where you need to right click, and then hitting that keyboard button (assuming you have one). Funny story though.