I use an RGB mouse pad in the office and I’m not ashamed

Recently, The Verge’s assessments team has been creating an hard work to get rid of some of the historic products we have lying all around our business. We have donated or thrown away some really prehistoric devices. But there was one product that, the next I laid eyes on it, I understood I wanted to rescue. It was the Razer Firefly, a seven-calendar year-previous mouse pad with a glowing RGB lightstrip all over the edge. It was a fantastically foolish and further machine, and I realized it was built for me.

I have now been applying the Razer Firefly at my desk in The Verge’s Manhattan workplace for many months. It offers 16.8 million customizable shade selections. It sits at my facet all working day, flashing purple, pink, crimson, yellow, blue, and all the things in involving. “But what does it do?” a variety of people today have requested me as they walk by. It does completely diddly squat, I explain to them. It is an aesthetic, a vibe. But some times, that vibe is almost everything.

It’s certainly enjoyable to despise on obnoxious RGB setups. (And I have been recognised to do it myself for the reason that I sustain that some coloured merchandise are definitely excessive — Asus ROG Strix line, I’m wanting at you.)

But each and every working day I use the Firefly, I warm much more up to the strategy of a (a little) coloured set up. For individuals of us who generally work in solitude (both simply because we’re distant or because most of our co-personnel are), existence can come to feel like a bit of a hamster wheel — we function and get the job done and the operate continues, and when co-employees and good friends exist as names and icons that reside on our screens, there are points the place it is really hard to encourage ourselves that it is all likely any where, that any person at all is listening.

So though I know it could not be far more mid-2010s basement gamer of me, I will proceed to allow myself the mouse pad. While the sun cycles and capitalist routines develop into so instinctual as to feel monotonic, a single can in no way forecast which shade will following look on the Firefly.

The place of work close to me might be grey and vacant, but the Firefly is shiny, pleased to be listed here, and incredibly significantly alive. That LED strip is a twinge of senseless exciting on a desk total of utility, and that twinge is a reminder that there are compact pleasures, there are shocking joys, and there is a entire world exterior these walls.