I could feel the tension in the room growing as I unscrewed the air duct cover and carefully peered inside
I understand that this quarantine has been extremely difficult on some people. For a while there, I thought that my family was doing pretty well and I wasn’t very concerned about our well-being. And then, my kids started doing weird stuff. That’s when it became obvious that they were struggling a lot more with the shelter-in-place order than the adults were. In fact, I have been pretty happily working from home and enjoying all of the focused work that I was getting done. I could happily spend 10 or 12 hours a day plugging away at my computer without feeling fatigued. Then, one day my laptop seemed to be missing. I searched high and low, but the computer was nowhere to be found. I only figured out what had happened to it after noticing something strange inside my air vent. I was hanging out with the kids when I looked up and saw a strange light blinking at me in between the slats of our air vents. Immediately, I was panicked that someone was using our HVAC system to spy on the family. I thought there could be a camera or listening device in our ductwork, potentially hidden behind every single air vent. If the heating and cooling system wasn’t running, the mic would easily be able to pick up our voices through the air vents. I shushed to the kids and creeped closer to the air vent. I could feel the tension in the room growing as I unscrewed the air duct cover and carefully peered inside. That’s when I found my laptop. My kids had hidden it in the ductwork so I would stop working so much.
