Just the mention of that five-letter word, “m-o-u-s-e,” the same word that helped make Walt Disney super-rich, drives our youngest daughter, Kayla, into absolute panic. Almost everyone has an unhealthy fear of something — I won’t fly in airplanes. For Kayla, it’s the tiny, furry creature better known as a mouse. In fact, those who know her well don’t use the word around her. They say “creature” instead.

So, you’re probably wondering why I became disturbed recently when I couldn’t find the mouse. It only makes Kayla disturbed — more like panic-stricken — if she knows there is a mouse in the room, and no one can find it.

Obviously, we are talking about two different kinds of “mice.” This story is about an evening on the road in a hotel room in Decatur, Ill., when I couldn’t find my computer mouse, the gadget that allows you to control your keyboard. I couldn’t find it because I walked out and left it on my desk in my home office, now some 200 miles away. Carla, my wife, made it clear very quickly that we weren’t going home to get my mouse.

Actually, I don’t like mice either, the real kind or the computer kind. But I have used my laptop keyboard so much that some keys stick, even after cleaning with compressed air. So, I rely on an external wireless keyboard operated by a wireless mouse.

More to the story

Easy solution, Carla says. She saw a Target down the street, so we will buy a new mouse. We did, and now I have two mice, one on my desk and a spare on my cabinet, inside a toy John Deere barge wagon, where I keep important stuff.

Back to the story. We get the mouse back to the hotel, and I tear through the packaging and open the battery compartment. Great, it already has a battery in it, and I spent $9 on batteries. Not every store sells cheap batteries.

Well, I should be good to go. I flip the switch on the underbelly of the mouse to “on,” set down at the desk and prepare to scroll. Nothing happens. Really great. Either the battery is bad or it’s a defective mouse.

“Wait,” Carla says. “You have to have a small chip that goes into your computer to make the mouse wireless.”

What? Carla was the only tech-savvy person in the room.

“Where’s the packaging? It’s probably still in there,” she says.

“I threw it in the waste basket. Let me look. No, there is nothing in there.”

“Look in the wastebasket, maybe it fell out,” she says.

Not my favorite job, but I look — still don’t find anything.

Then she opens the battery compartment on the back of the mouse again.

“Oh, wait, it’s sitting right here, inside the mouse. You just pull it out and stick it in the computer port,” she says, smiling.

“Great, a mouse with a hidden compartment inside. Why didn’t they tell me?”

Maybe they did. By then, I had torn up all the packaging except the part in Spanish.

I stuck the chip in the port, turned on the mouse, and the computer went running all over the screen. Happy days!

The moral of this story is that you must be smarter than a mouse. Somehow that just doesn’t sound right!