So I was using VNC to access my iMac at home, and the system was behaving very curiously – using IM to talk with a colleague, the stuff I was typing was spattered with lots of extra whitespace and some extra characters:

lik           e          t h   i s       .

…as if someone was holding down the space bar.

Then I remembered Buster’s current fad for sleeping on the keyboard.

So I booted iTunes, cranked up the system volume and playback volume to maximum, and double-clicked on some podcast or another…

BOOM.

Problem fixed.