Geeking havoc

Good morning, one and all. I hope everyone's feeling chipper out there. Not like a wood chipper, mind you; I'm pretty sure that's the opposite of my original intention. So welcome. Ya know, for all the time I spend at the end of these posts wishing people happy full and half-birthdays, you'd think that I wouldn't gloss over key dates like the Ides of March and St. Patrick's Day. You'd be wrong though. In any case, I hope you survived the former and enjoyed the latter.

Back in December, I purchased something from an amazing website called ThinkGeek. Some of the stuff on there is way too technical for me to even know what they're spoofing, but I found something on there that I thought my boss might like. It's a mini drum kit that you play with your fingers (http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/cubegoodies/922f/), and I found it cool at least. However, I had no idea at the time that that gift would only yield about 1/1000th of the pleasure that I got from the "free gift with purchase." By spending a certain amount of money, I got a free device called The Annoy-a-tron. Here are the key parts of the item's 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.

With its thin design and embedded magnet for easy hiding, the Annoy-a-tron can be placed in a variety of locations.

Assuming you have done your part in selecting a suitable hiding location for the Annoy-a-tron, it will do its part to drive your co-workers slowly mad with its short and seemingly random beeps. And when someone does locate the Annoy-a-tron, they're really not going to know what it is - which is almost as much fun as watching them search for it. Muahaha.

So once we got back to work during the first week of January, I thought about what would be the most suitable hiding place. I didn't want to subject my boss to this, mainly because I'm not a moron. My co-worker Jamie didn't deserve the torture, and Rob wouldn't have found it funny at all. In fact, I could see him getting very upset, yelling at the facilities managers, and unintentionally taking all of the joy out of the prank. But my co-worker named Scott...now that's a different story. Scott's a prankster in his own right (including the occasional hiring of a singing telegram in a full gorilla costume for someone's birthday), so I knew he'd eventually appreciate it. Also, there was a little sense of payback for the amount of stress he's caused me by consistently running five minutes late to conference calls and meetings. As a hyperpunctual person, that doesn't fly with me whatsoever. And he toys with me, often lying about when he'll be somewhere just to make me a bit more nervous.

So Scott won the honorable distinction of having me hide The Annoy-a-tron in his office. I found the perfect spot: the inside metal lip of a small table in the far corner of his office. I told almost everyone else in the office about the gag, turned it on, and waited to see what would happen. In all honesty, I expected Scott to complain about a beeping sound, find the device within a day or two, accuse us of planting it there, and then we'd all share a laugh as he called me names. Well my friends, my assumption was a little bit off.

A week went by, and I hadn't heard a peep out of Scott about any hearing any noises. I made sure to turn it off at the end of each day and then back on in the mornings in an effort to save the battery. Every time I turned it on, it beeped, so I knew it must have been working. The next week, I sat in Scott's office when I heard a beep from the corner. He didn't bat an eye and kept talking. Was he going deaf? If so, then this was a horrible idea. A few minutes later, it beeped again. I couldn't hold it in any longer. "Did you hear something?" I asked. "YES!" he yelled, with an exasperated look on his face. "I've been hearing that beeping for a week now. I think something's battery is dying but I can't figure out where it's coming from." Being fairly quick on my feet, I turned the exact opposite direction of where I planted The Annoy-a-tron and said, "It sounded like it came from over there."

A couple more weeks went by, with the same scene playing out over and over again. "I gotta find out what that is. It has to be either something losing its power or some kind of bug." "You think someone's bugging you?" I asked, trying my best to seem genuinely concerned. "It's possible, I guess." To maximize the fun factor, I'd occasionally leave The Annoy-a-tron off for a few days at a time before turning it back on. "Still hearing that beeping?" I asked. "Ya know, I didn't for a few days, but I just heard it a minute ago!" "Still coming from over here?" I asked, pointing in the wrong direction. "There are two beeps," he said. "One is coming from the that corner, and the other I think is coming from over there, but maybe up in the ceiling." That led to the three-week period in which he thought it was a smoke detector with a dying battery.

Two months into the journey, Scott seemed to be coming a little unhinged. Determined to find the source of the on-again/off-again beeping, he began unplugging various electronic devices around his office. The phone and plant that lived on the small table (under which the device was hiding) were temporarily moved into the lobby area. The television, cable box, and shredder were unplugged and scrutinized for any visible problems. Nothing seemed to work though, so he gave up and just tried to accept the fact that something was going to beep every few minutes on some days of the week.

That might make it seem like it lost its fun, but that's not the case. In fact, that's when the other office mates got involved to make Scott really start to question his sanity. "Did you hear that?" we'd ask, when there hadn't been any sound whatsoever. When it would beep, we'd keep a straight face and pretend not to have heard it. Then my boss and I "heard" the sound of a monkey going, "Hoo hoo" every so often. Scott just threw his hands up in the air and said, "I don't even know anymore. I don't think I'm going crazy, so something weird is definitely going on."

I was thinking of turning it off for a good week or two just to make him think the problem had resolved itself. I thought the payoff would be great when it reared its beeping head once more. I didn't get there though, because something happened. "Scott just found a bug in his office," a co-worker who wasn't in on the gag told me on Tuesday of this week. "What?" I asked, careful not to give myself away yet. "Yeah, something beeped, and his friend got on the ground and found a little electronic thing hidden under a table." I got up and went in there. Here's a synopsis of how the next half an hour played out:

Me: So it's a bug?

Scott's Friend: Yes. It definitely is. I've seen bugs before, and this is transmitting somewhere.

Me: (to Scott) Why would someone bug you?

Scott: I don't know, but this is fucked up.

Scott's Friend: Based on the size and battery, this thing can't be more than six months old. It has to be transmitting to somewhere close by. (He catches Jamie smiling.) Maybe these guys had something to do with it.

Me: Oh yeah, 'cause I want to hear everything Scott's saying.

Scott: No, and that looks like it's expensive.

Scott's Friend: I know a guy who I can bring this to. He can tell us if it's FBI, CIA, military, or something else.

Scott: Oh crap. Oh crap.

Me: If anyone's listening in there, my name is Peter Klein, and I've done nothing illegal.

Scott: Oh crap. Oh crap.

I then texted my boss (who was out of town) to tell him what was going on. I grabbed The Annoy-a-tron's box from my office, and I was about to present it to Scott and come clean with the whole thing, but I waited until he finished leaving a slightly-panicked message on our boss's voicemail. He hung up and said, "I think I need to go bring this somewhere and find out what it is. It'll cost me $500 if I go to the one place I know, but that's worth it." That was enough for me. I printed out The Annoy-a-tron's page from the ThinkGeek site and put it on Scott's desk. "Hey Scott, it kinda looks like this, don't you think?" "That's it!" he said excitedly. "And it looks like it would come in a box like this, right?" I asked, as I put it next to the printout. He looked up at me, and confusion turned to disbelief, which morphed into a mix of smiling relief and dissipating anger. "You fucker!" he said. "I knew it was them," his friend chimed in. "Was that before or after you told us the approximate transmitting distance?" Rob asked.

For the next hour, Scott said many things about not believing that "mild-mannered Peter" played this trick on him. I pointed out that the device said "ANNOY" on it, but he said it was too small to read and looked like "ALLOY." He asked if we were snickering behind his back every time he unplugged something or moved the plant, and we said it was much more often than that. I told him that I knew he could take it, and I wouldn't have done that to anyone else in the office. That didn't make it any better though, and he vowed to get revenge on me for making him think that he was either crazy or under surveillance by the government. He had two final thoughts on the subject: "Payback is a bitch," and, "Payback is a motherfucker." I'll let you all know how that turns out. This free gift ended up causing an exponentially higher amount of entertainment than I ever could've guessed, so I regret nothing...yet.

And now, let's magnetically affix ourselves onto the Car Watch.

My homey Rockabye sent me this license plate: "KANSKID." I have to believe it's one of three things, each with a flaw. If it's "Kansas Kid," then the missing extra S makes it more confusing than it should be. If it's "Kan's Kid," what kind of name is Kan? Is it short for some funky spelling of Candice? Is it going the Courtney route (which has about 30 spellings now), leading to Khandyss and Kanndhis? I hope not. And if the plate is supposed to be, "Can Skid," then the driver needs better tires right away.

I saw a license plate frame, and between reading the top and bottom of it, I was able to slip in a thought and an entire memory. Pretty special, eh? So the top said, "All Eyez on Me." "Wait a minute, that sounds familiar," I thought. Then I remembered why. Years ago, I sent my friend Dusty a text message about a license plate frame I saw that confused me. "All Eyes on Me" was on top, and "Fijian Pride" on the bottom. Was the driver just vain and proud of her heritage? "Is it some kind of pun with the three dotted letters in a row?" Dusty wondered. We never came to a consensus, but I went back to that in my mind before looking at the bottom of the frame in front of me. What did it say? "2Hard's Mom." Well that's different. And it was a guy driving. I drove away more confused than ever.

Lastly, I was behind a car with this plate: "1TRU QT." I wanted to see how accurate the driver was in his or her self-assessment. So when the opportunity presented itself, I passed the car on the right and saw the woman driving. Um, gee, how can I put this politely? I think Borat said it best with, "You, eh, not so much." I don't normally go around judging people by their outer beauty, but when you tell everyone on the road that you're cute, you kinda have to be cute. Sorry, lady.

Ok, I've taken up way more of your time than I originally anticipated, so I'll make this part brief. Happy half-birthday today to our friend Paul, and happy 5th anniversary tomorrow to my lovely and increasingly wonderful wife. Have a great week everyone, and if you have a March Madness bracket, may your hunches prove to be accurate. As always, you can reach me at ptklein@gmail.com. Take care.