A simple curse(sor)

For months now, I've been plagued by a wanderlust cursor. This roving bar on my laptop screen had a mind of its own: it would have the audacity to mosey off to a distant sentence or a random word before I was ready to release it. Of course, I'd be typing furiously to keep up with my thoughts ... but the written words would appear everywhere else but. Here.

I tried everything. Tolerance at first. It'll be my spiritual practice, I told myself. Deep breathes, acknowledge the frustration, practice patience. Hmm ... that helped me deal with the situation but not the situation itself. Not good enough for me.

So, I googled for help. And, I got it. Lots and lots -- apparently it is a known problem for laptops. Disable the touchpad, they all say. That's easy enough but then I discovered that not only do I have a nomadic pointer, I also have a Houdini-inspired touchpad. Oh, the touchpad is there alright, but there are no signs of its existence in my system. No icon, no hardware, no ... nothing. You can't hardly turn something off that's ... not there.

At my wit's end, I sought out an ex-friend of a friend who offered to help reel in this errant cursor of mine. He looked at my laptop, did all the things I did and a tried a couple more on his own. He suggested a few more things, including cracking open my computer, exposing its innards and turning it off that way. Deep breathes.

Then, the winning entry.

"You know," he said, almost as an afterthought, "You could do what my dad did. He covered the touchpad with a piece of cardboard ...and it has not bothered him since."

And there you go. So, yes, I'm the one typing on a Dell Inspiron M140 with a two by three piece of baby blue cardstock where the touchpad is.

My cursor is free -- no more.