I worked on my manager’s computer a while back. While waiting for an operation to complete, I was idly spinning the cursor around the screen, as many do. My manager asked why techs often seem to do that.

“Oh,” I said, “sometimes you have to spin the mouse around in a clockwise direction to wind it up. You don’t have to do it very often, but we usually do it while we’re working on other things to save time.”

The manager swallowed the story, and my co-workers and I had a good chuckle about it later.

A few days later, another of our guys was working on the same machine. The manager caught him moving the cursor around while he was waiting on the computer to finish something.

“Why are you spinning the cursor counterclockwise?” the manager asked.

Without missing a beat, he replied, “Every so often, they get wound up too tight, and you have to unwind them.”