Not a new curse, but very rare.
It’s an homage to the days of floppy diskettes. Usually, when there was an unrecoverable disk read fail the system would make a characteristic grind-buzz-kachunk noise as the drive tried a hi-low track seek before stopping. Then it threw the dreaded error, “Problem reading disk. Abort (A)? Retry ®? Fail (F)?”
It meant your game was cooked.
You could source a pair of gigabit media converters and a length of fiber on Amazon for about $100. Just use the media converters to extend the Ethernet port from where the Internet hands off in your house over to your office. You can affix the fiber along baseboards and up over door frames with adhesive cleats and zip ties, or those nylon staples on a nail they use to tack down coax cable.
If you’re willing to spend a little more on the fiber for a custom color, you can probably even order the fiber in a more neutral color than SMF yellow to blend into the trim better.