McDonald’s Drive-Thrus and OOM Kills
We organizers just wrapped up the Data Platform DEI Neurodiversity Day, which I helped host while battling a pretty major illness. During two sessions especially, one by James Reeves and another by Itzel Yagual, I had a bit of an epiphany about how my brain works and I thought I’d share.
I’ve long known that I’m wired differently as a neurodiverse individual. I give the term multitasking a run for its money, as a professional once described my brain as having 25 McDonald’s drive-thrus, all taking orders at once. My daily goal, as someone with AuDHD, is to manage that traffic and to keep from burning out, which this professional also referred to as “avoiding wasting energy on too many Happy Meals”, AKA distractions.
When I’m on stage speaking, I’m in full control with one clear lane open and smooth traffic flow and only a few distractions. But in loud or chaotic environments like exhibitor halls or noisy restaurants, every drive-thru lights up, taking in random noise that offers no real value. That sensory overload drains me fast.
One of those “drive-thrus” runs a soundtrack in my head, 24X7. It’s a real playlist (currently on Spotify) that’s been looping for years, new songs coming in from time to time, old ones removed, but I can’t tell you how surprised I was to find out not everyone hears music in their head 24X7. It plays whether or not I have headphones on, even in my dreams. When I do have headphones on, this playlist is on my phone and is a great controlled distraction that helps me focus. The gist is, my brain just doesn’t need a music player to have the music playing. If I take my headphones off, my brain is very happy to just keep playing the songs in my head. But this week, I became aware of something I’d missed when I was ill in the past.
As I fought off a fever while hosting the event, I noticed an eerie silence. My mental playlist which I’d never noticed not playing, had gone quiet. During the Neurodiversity Day sessions, it hit me that my brain had done what a Linux server does when resources are low: it killed a background process. My internal “OOM kill” (Out of Memory) had taken out the playlist channel. When I finally woke at 4 a.m., I knew I was recovering because “99 Problems” by Hugo was blasting in my head: my playlist was back! The question is, in the past, when I was quite ill, did this happen then, too and I simply missed that it was missing?
Needless, I think it’s time to retire the McDonald’s analogy. My brain is more like a high-CPU Linux server running multiple LLMs and databases, where nonessential processes are shut down when resources are over-allocated.
And as for large, noisy social events? I’ll be referring to those as ransomware attacks from now on.
