The Usual Stuff, It Bores Me

For a few months, I satisfied myself with the usual cadre of pranks: hiding Big J's wallet, sending emails to the entire company from his account when he's away from his desk and hasn't locked the keyboard (Subject: "Important", Text: "I'm a wiener."). And of course there's the perennial favorite - shooting him in the face with my Koosh Vortex Firestorm rifle as he's intently debugging code.

These things have a tendency to wear away at someone's sanity, but certainly not quickly enough for my tastes. They have also largely been preamble, the sort of gentle annoyances that have lulled Big J into believing I have no stomach for greater pranking. Time to start upping the voltage.

Today is the first turn of the knob. Sweet torture, thy name is Annoy-a-Tron.

There are few things that drive a technie to murderous rage faster than Mystery Noises. I speak on great authority here: I'm Type A, I'm a programmer, and I need to be The Master of My Tech Domain. As I kid, I would program everyone's VCR to have the correct time. It wasn't that I had nothing better to do (well, OK, I was a nerd and didn't have anything better to do, but I swear that's beside the point) - it was an affront to my sensibilities to see that flashing "12:00".
And I can't abide mystery noises. You know the type. The UPS low power alert. The grind and whinny of a CPU fan that's going on its last legs. The chirp of an office-mate's voicemail notifier.

These things aren't bad when taken in the overall din of noise we're usually surrounded in. But in isolation they are maddening, the more so to a true techie. You are irritated my the intrusion of sound. Then you are doubly irritated at not knowing what the fuck is making the sound. Somewhere, something is trying to tell you something. What does it mean?

Programmers need quiet to focus and to delve deeply into their work. Distractions (meetings, a "quick question" from a coworker, and even annoying noises) pull you out of the zen meditation of man contemplating the hex dump of a wayward piece of software.

Hence Thinkgeek.com's Annoy-a-Tron. A more barbaric torture device for a programmer has never been developed. From the product description:

"The Annoy-a-tron generates a short (but very annoying, hence the name) beep every few minutes. Your unsuspecting target will have a hard time 'timing' the location of the sound because the beeps will vary in intervals ranging from 2 to 8 minutes. The 2kHz sound is generically annoying enough, but if you really really want to aggravate somebody, select the 12 kHz sound. Trust us. The higher frequency and slight 'electronic noise' built into that soundbyte will make a full-grown Admin wonder where his packets are."

Good enough in theory, but how is it in practice? In a word: staggeringly, utterly irritating. I bypassed wussy mode, and dove directly into the 12kHz mode. The noise lasts about 3/4 of a second, and is every bit the distorted, irritating thing you can't quite put your finger on. The proverbial cut on the roof of your mouth that you can't quit tonguing. And sure enough, it fires just infrequently enough that you have completely forgotten about it by the next time it goes off. Certainly not frequently enough to triangulate its location.

So here we go: Day 1. The device is in place. Revenge will be mine.