We never really got to grips with the schoolboy fantasy world of Ian Fleming, but we’re told that in one of the James Bond books, he suggests that when a flower is picked, it emits a scream of anguish so high-pitched that it’s outside the range of human hearing, and now some researchers in Evansville, Indiana have come up with the equally bizarre suggestion that if the women in the office complain of tensions and headaches, it may be down not to the drearyness of the job and the insufferability of the men in the place, but to the endless whining of the computers, reports the Daily Mail: the questing Indianans report that your friendly desk-top micro emits bat-deafening squeal that is near the limit of the frequency range of the human ear and that as female ears have a better frequency range than men [no that’s not the reason they always seem to hear the things they’re not meant to – that’s because you shouldn’t have said/done it in the first place] – and that that is what is driving the ladies up the wall – or it could just be that researchers in Indiana Very flat, Indiana, as Sir Noel Coward might have said if he’d made Elliot and Amanda in Private Lives Americans – simply have nothing better to do.
