Back in ze olden dayz
I used to be the poor guy who had to clean the mice on a voluntary basis.
Invariably the machines had been crudded to death and upon sitting down found that one or more things didn't work.
Typically the floppy drive was misaligned, mouse was crudded to Hell and back or something else was screwy.
Some nice person saw fit to start going round STEALING the mouse balls resulting in someone supergluing the base.
Note, Zip drives really do suck. I very nearly lost 2 weeks work because the drive did in my disk(s) and resulted in
me having to reconstruct it from the previously written copy.
To be honest even a Minidisk (tm) would have done a better job at 140MB per disk.