The silence of the fans

It’s amazing how used you get to certain situations and how some stimulus responses wire themselves into your brain.

For three years now it’s been a given that if the monitor in the study is lit, there is a loud whirring noise from the computer by my desk. Not a horrible, grating noise, but more of a strident white noise reminder that the computer is on, dammit, and I should do some work on it instead of letting it waste its cycles on checking email every five minutes and doing absolutely nothing to cure cancer or help with world peace.

But now the whirr is gone, replaced by a barely audible whisper that says, “Hey, I’m on if you—you know—feel like doing something. But if not, that’s cool too. I’ll keep the monitor on for you.”

White noise is the enemy of sanity.