If you'd kept asking the 5 whys you'd have gotten to the real problem: noisy machines in open offices. You should have thanked the lady who put the paperclips on the fans.
We also had dot matrix printers churning out triplicate documents.
They were lucky, us in IT were technically working illegally due to the noise in our part of the building. So many fans in so many server racks. Plus super cold a/c.