Joni continued to type fiercely, at a monotonic, steady pace.

Venla was amused. Sometimes she wondered if Joni was just faking the whole thing. Can a flow be that good??

Joni probably wouldn’t notice even a fire alarm going off.

But the secret to Joni’s flow was actually his optoelectric counter-sound noise-canceling sound stream. Made with a close-to-€1000 headphones… Joni lived in a totally different world, quite literally. It was a world of artificial panacea.

Venla continued to follow him, quietly by the side. She thought of touching his neck with her gothic, ultra sharp, extravaganza long nails. Just the thought of pushing his buttons made her giggle. He wouldn’t hear a thing. But he would definitely feel something. SUCH A ZAP!

But then she thought about crap like PC, and corporate politicy. Even in their cute non-corp corporation these, shall we say – unorthodox things – could lead to serious shit. Besides, they say you can kill someone by startling. The heart can stop. Besides 2: she was head of HR. Not that it would matter, much, she thought.

Damn. Bad thoughts. Stop it. Stop. Just. Watch. Relax. No teasing.

There was something almost magically hypnotic about his concentration. She guessed that Joni experienced a perfect flow. She’d had similar experiences. Albeit with serious side effects. Things that she preferred to keep totally to herself.

Venla smiled to herself, remembering how Joni had told her that he was once in a company health-checkup. He came up with proposition for a new sort of occupational hazard: the “^x-e syndrome”.

In Emacs editor, code is executed on the fly, as a test, by holding the fingers of the left hand in a strange twist and clicking the “control” button at the bottom, first the ‘x’, then the letter ‘e’. No one but Joni did it in here, at our company – and judging by the need for having to come up with a new term, not in the whole wide Finnish IT scene either.