Ewen therefore again made the long drive, and within moments of arriving, he noticed the giant PC was very quiet.

A quick look showed why: the fans weren't working.

Ewen asked if anyone had noticed a problem.

"Oh, the noise was annoying me," replied one of the testing engineers. "So I opened the case and cut the wires." //

Bill GraySilver badge
Chesterton's fence
G. K. Chesterton wrote something that boils down to : if you see a fence running across a road, you shouldn't tear it down until you figure out why it was put there. Somebody presumably went to the time, trouble, and expense of erecting the fence, and had some reason for doing it.

You may eventually learn that their reason no longer applies, or just doesn't matter as much as it used to, and then you might pull the fence down on a suitably informed basis. But you shouldn't equate "I don't see why that's there" with "there's no good reason for that to be there".

As I recall, he was mostly thinking in terms of politics. The idea is that each generation comes along and assumes its parents were idiots, and that society should be rebuilt on more sensible, modern principles... usually without first considering why the parents did such idiotic things. But it's a good engineering principle as well.