Goodness, what a day it was.
By the mere 3rd chirp of my nicely hidden Annoy-a-Tron, Big J was already irritated. "Did you guys hear that?" he said, his voice rising at the end in a crescendo of pique. Mind you, the 3RD CHIRP. The timing was beautiful, too- it fired twice in the morning programmer pow-wow, the 2nd time right after I arrived in the office. I hadn't anticipated how hard it would be to keep from biting my lower lip clean off trying to stifle the laughter.
At the morning leads meeting, it went off again. Loud enough to hear in the conference area. At least he knows he's not hearing imaginary noises, because others confirm they hear it as well. I have enough people in on the joke that we are offering only silly suggestions as to the source. They all lead him away from the true problem, and it's true resting place.
By lunch time, Big J was deep in the process of debugging the noise. He'd begun turning laptop, UPS, and main machine off, in order. Waiting. No noise. Turn on the UPS again. *chirp*! That's what you call a "false positive": a reinforcement that indicates the problem is coming from the thing you just changed, when in fact it is completely unrelated. "It must be my UPS!" he thinks.
Now comes the insidious part: Big J is out of the office a moment, and I creep in and deactivate the 'Tron. So now it silently waits, while he grows comfortable with the quiet again. Next week, our little friend shall return.
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