Dunno what made me think of this just now. When I worked for IT in a school district way back in the 90s, a librarian told me she kept a supply of mouse balls in her desk because kids would steal them out of the school computers. What I remember about those balls was they picked up dust and crud off surfaces. Pretty soon optical mice came along and they were history.
Dunno if was my parents or genetics or what, but as a kid I never had the urge to do stuff like that. My impulse was make up funny stuff. The idea of breaking or ruining something seemed bad to me. So if I had gone to school in the age of computer mice I would have been pissed off if some kid disabled the mouse. It didn’t bother me when my friend tricked the voice synthesizer at the science center to repeat “Fuck you, fuck you…” but I would have called him an asshole if he poured a drink into the keyboard.