That's not just a beautiful high-level description, it's even therapeutic: the next time my HDD is thrashing I'll sit patiently and think that the Page King is too busy ruling his kingdom to grant my humble request right now.
For example, by my forgetting that the "-j" option of "make" had the number of concurrent tasks as an optional parameter, and without that it simply launches every possible compile simultaneously. Paralysis of course: given its uncanny tendency to pick the wrong target I could just about believe that the OOM killer then sniped the King