On the syscall IO backend, on TPC-H query 12, the _dominating_ part
of the stack trace is trying to construct affinities from a character,
failing, allocating an error&string, and then immediately falling back to
Blob affinity and dropping the error&string.
Since I'm on vacation I won't spend cycles on figuring out why we are passing
an incorrect affinity in `flags.get_affinity()` and instead make this lazy PR
just to improve performance and stop doing silly things :]
a0613ef781