A new week, a new piece of jargon.  The modern office is as rich a hunting-ground for new phrases as Shakespeare’s Globe during Elizabethan England.  The latest addition to my vocabulary is ‘mouse jiggler’, although I am aware that the term has been around for some time.

When I first read the headline that someone had been sacked for mouse jiggling, my sympathies were instinctively for the mouse.  Although no great fan of mice myself, no one wants to be gratuitously jiggled, do they?  Rodent or human alike.

However, reading on, I discovered the article was not talking about that kind of mouse; not talking about that kind of jiggling for that matter either.

Mouse jiggling is the practice of artificially simulating the motion of the mouse on a computer, with the object of preventing that computer going to ‘sleep’ mode when it is not in use.  This procedure is being adopted by some remote workers to make it appear that they are busily engaged in honest graft when they are actually off down the gym / sunbathing in the garden / doing a bit of personal jiggling of their own.

A brief piece of research – a quick look on Amazon – revealed umpteen devices available for purchase, for very modest sums, which described themselves as mouse jigglers, and which performed this function of faking keyboard activity.  But, is a device or an app really needed for this?

My entire career has been one of faking keyboard activity; simulating work as and when required; why else would I need the desk, which always faces towards the door?  I am a habitual mouse jiggler.  Long before the concept of widespread remote working, I could be found happily mouse jiggling in the office.

Morally, it might be easy to condemn a mouse jiggler, but where would the world be without all its mouse jigglers?

Albert Einstein?  Surely a mouse jiggler.  Philip Larkin?  A literary mouse jiggler. 

Mouse jiggling: it is a state of mind.  Embrace it.

© Simon Turner-Tree

Simon Turner-Tree advocates mouse jigglers of the world to unite.