Bill Kearney

Always buy a spare

Damn it, damn it all!

I have got to learn to always buy a spare mouse or keyboard. Not from the perspective of having an immediate replacement on-hand. No, while that's a good idea, it's not the reason I'm complaining here.

I suggest buying a spare because the vendors keep fucking around with what are otherwise good things.

Take, for example, Kensington's TurboRing. This was a sweet device. Granted like all mechanical trackballs it suffered it's fair share of problems with dirt gumming up the works. But it had this scroll ring around the ball that was a joy to use. They abandoned it and had no replacement until recently. Trouble is their current ring is worse. It's too close to the buttons and ends up causing unintended clicking. So when mine died I was forced to switch to another vendor.

Same thing goes with keyboards. I've had a Microsoft Internet Pro keyboard for ages. I've loved using it. The response of the keys had been excellent. But recently it's started to wear out. I got a Microsoft Multimedia keyboard as a replacement and I don't like it. Not only is the key action different (mushier) but they've arbitrarily moved the god-damned keys around. Now instead of clusters of four function keys they're in groups of three. To hell with manual finger memory as frequently used sequences like Alt-F4, Ins, Home and End have been moved. I thought I could live with this until I also noticed they've taken away the right-Windows key. I hate that key being on the left side. It gets pressed far too frequently when Ctrl and Alt are needed. Why, oh why do vendors (and MS is not alone here) insist on doing this?

Trouble is, now I can't get the old keyboard anymore. Grrrr....

And I'm expecting, much like Kensington, any repair or warranty replacements aren't the same model but the new ones instead.

Talk about being a good sales-prevention tool. Instead of attempting to retain loyal customers (the best and cheapest form of sales) they're forcing us to look to the offerings from their competition. Once a customer defects to another vendor it's extremely difficult to ever get them to return.

The point of this story ends up being, when you decide you really like the style of a given input device immediately go out and buy a spare. Otherwise it seems you can absolutely count on the vendors screwing you.