The 5 Whys

If there's an award to the most overworked member in my home, it will undoubtedly go to.... my desktop PC. It runs all day, 24/7. The last time it is turned off, 8months and 5days ago, when there was an electrical blackout. Mostly it served as a slave to my sister and I, occasionally for doing academic-related research, for printing lecture notes and going through lecture web casts, more frequently though, for social networking and emailing functions. But mostly, what it did was storing up terabytes worth of music videos, movies, songs and variety shows from all over the world.

Just hours earlier, mother brought up the topic of buying a new fan for the home.

"Why do we need another fan mother?", sis and I querried.

"... Well the weather is hot, the fan in Ivy's room is spoilt and we can do with a new fan. But it is a good fan, you can put water in it and it cools better than our normal fan." mother replied.

Curious and unconvinced, I continued probing, "Why would we need another fan when we already have 3 fans in the living room, and one which we haven't used for quite a while?" (Not to mention that sis hardly sleeps in her room these days. She's the resident 庭長, she puts up in the living room.)

"The weather is so hot, we need a better fan to cool the house... And our living room is too hot, you all always use the computer, its so hot it's heating the living room up. And it is cheap, 100+ only."

Well at least she finally let it out, the key phrase being "always use the computer".

Now that she mentioned it, I realised it is true that our computer is always ON, and it does generate plenty of latent heat as it runs day and night, though not to the extent of a electric heater. In my quest to get to the root cause, I ran through the 5 Whys in my head.

1. Why is the computer always ON?
ans: So that b**comet and em*** is always running

2. Why do we need to keep these 2 applications running through the night?
ans: So that the downloads will complete

3. Why?
ans: So we can watch the movies/ songs/ variety shows

4. Why?
ans: Because the downloaded version has higher quality and does not lag compared to those available on streaming websites.

5. Why do we need to watch those movies/ variety shows?
ans: Kill time/ entertainment

Hmmm.... I recalled the times when I spent hours watching some lame movie I downloaded so I can delete them thereafter and free up the diskspace to download other stuff, and nights when my sis was falling asleep in front of the computer for the very same reason. What if I had spent those hours on my academic pursuit instead?

Maybe it's time to turn off the computer tonight.
[Anyway, the weather is so hot these days, might as well right.]