My laptop started making a Very Bad Noise on Tuesday morning, the kind of whirring creak I usually associate with the death throes of a hard drive. It didn’t sound exactly like a hard drive, which often clicks or knocks, and the whir was rather slower paced than the high RPMs of a hard drive. But as I didn’t think this Macbook Pro had a fan, since I had never heard one, I just assumed the only moving part was the hard drive and so I ordered a new one online using my wife’s computer.

When the drive arrived today, I opened the laptop to swap out the hard drive, and lo! there was a box elder bug caught in one of the two small fans on the logic board. Yes, my computer had a bug in it. I pulled out the lifeless, hard little black and orange-striped carcass, and put the cover back on. Started without problem or Very Bad Noise.

I had thought that the term “bug” used to describe a computer glitch was coined after someone found a moth in an early computer. But according to the all-knowing Wikipedia I was wrong. Nonetheless, I was relieved to discover this bug and to fix the problem so easily.

And now I have a spare drive for that time when my hard drive really does die.