It was the sound of mating mice which alerted me to something wrong.
Fortunately, I didn’t have a rat infestation problem. What I did have sounded like a hard drive on its last legs, grinding out the reminder of its 1′s and 0′s as diligently as a half-dead piece of machinery could. A few minutes more, the operating system would finally play heed to its requiem and terminate the farce, freezing my machine in the middle of an online game.
It’s always in the middle of game.