The Dongle Dilemma

There exists in the world of computational technology, a minuscule item that causes a multitude of searching and usually cursing as to its whereabouts. I refer of course, to the dongle. There is a very particular type of modern panic that can only be induced by the dongle, an object roughly the size of a thumbnail and the exact colour of a dropped contact lens.

I am Specifically talking about the tiny, wireless USB stub that acts as a sort of technological diplomat between my laptop and a mouse that has otherwise decided it is a paperweight. It is an object designed with a single, clear architectural objective: to be lost immediately.

Now, there will be people who will argue that there is no need whatsoever for the dongle/mouse arrangement when you have a perfectly good trackpad built into your laptop. Use that, they say. Which of course, is fine, if you have the dexterity of a human without fingers that have seen younger, more agile decades.

The logic then, behind the dongle is a testament to the terrifying heights of human ingenuity. A team of incredibly clever engineers in Silicon Valley sat down and decided that the best way to clean up the “clutter” of a six-foot wire was to replace it with a microscopic bit of plastic that can effortlessly slip between the microscopic gap of two sofa cushions and enter an alternate dimension.

To prevent you from losing it, they have thoughtfully provided a tiny slot inside the mouse itself, which is a brilliant solution right up until the moment you realise you have to transport the mouse to a different room, at which point the dongle must be plugged into the laptop, leaving the slot empty, and the universe instantly balances its books by making the dongle vanish during the four-yard walk to the kitchen.

To understand the sheer mathematical hostility of this arrangement, we have to look at the behaviour of subatomic particles. Quantum physicists have long observed that certain electrons exhibit a property known as “quantum tunnelling,” wherein they simply cease to exist in one place and instantaneously appear in another, passing through solid barriers without bothering with the intervening space.

I am entirely convinced that dongles are not manufactured from plastic at all, but are instead forged from pure, unstable quantum material. They exist in a state of probability; the moment you look away from your laptop to reach for a cup of coffee, the dongle evaluates the local space-time continuum, decides it would be much happier behind the radiator, and tunnels out of our reality.

Which brings us back to the desk. It turns out that the same fundamental laws of nature that govern the expansion of the cosmos also ensure that the smaller a piece of technology is, the more aggressively it seeks to escape human custody.

We have built machines capable of mapping the human genome and photographing the edges of black holes, yet we are entirely powerless against a piece of plastic smaller than a cashew nut. The mouse sits there, light blinking with a sort of smug, disconnected satisfaction, fully aware that its partner in communication is currently nestled deep within the stomach of the vacuum cleaner.

I have decided to solve the problem by putting the dongle back inside the belly of the mouse. Unless of course, I’m using it. In which case, it remains firmly secured in the USB port on my laptop. There is to be no variation, none. It’s either in the belly of the mouse, or in the USB port. It simply cannot exist anywhere else.

Failing that, I have decided to solve the problem by increasing the sensitivity of the trackpad so that it understands the movement of fingers that closer resemble a port sausage than a digit on a human hand. That way, I may well be able to leave the dongle inside the belly of the mouse. And leave the mouse to go back to dreaming being a paperweight.

What does ‘natural scrolling’ do again? And what is a ‘Quiet Click’? The one thing my plan didn’t account for is the need for an engineering degree to understand how to better use the trackpad.

Still, we’ll all be using touchscreens soon. And hoping the glass automatically repels our greasy thumbprints as we work while eating cheese and onion crisps.