> Maybe it’s because I’m just recovering from attending my 35-year college reunion, but I had a memory return of being in the college computer lab and telling someone to use the mouse to move the cursor, so they picked it up and waved it in the air.

I've seen this behavior in people that have seen other people use mouses for over a decade before, especially my Mom. It's my personal universal sign to immediately stop teaching that person anything. If you get shown a mouse move across a table like a pug, get explained that moving it up and down, left and right is a relative motion and you pick it up and wave it in the air you are just signaling that you do not want to learn.

My mom and her friends pestered me for years as a teen to show them how computers work and how to use them. When I tried to teach them the basics they were dismissive as if the computer had to conform to their way of thinking how the interaction should work. I learned to not engage with those people at all. Funnily enough, a decade later after they actually wanted to learn it they figured it out themselves.