A bit of backstory.
I'm working remotely on a construction site in Northern California at the moment. The engineering company I work for has set up a temporary field office in an old bank next to the construction site, and my workstation is about 30 feet from the bank safe. Because the office was once a bank, there are tons of wires, cables, cameras, motion detectors, buttons, and alarms everywhere--all of which were supposed to have been disabled. And because this is an engineering field office, we brought in tons of portable, battery-powered monitoring equipment, sensors, measuring devices, and stuff to help us track and control a wide range of data--everything from river flow rates and rainfall, to volatile organic compounds and water turbidity. Without turning my head, I can count 33 electronic devices in my cubicle alone.
I arrived on site about a month ago, to cover for one of my colleagues who will be traveling for a few months on another assignment. And ever since I got here, there has been this annoying little cricket-like chirp, similar to the sound some devices make when they have a low battery. One of the many, many devices in my office that constantly have low batteries. I've checked the batteries on every single device in the building, plus every old abandoned piece of equipment that was left behind by the bank. Nothing would stop the noise.
So, being an engineer, I used Science: I set a timer to measure the time between chirps--low battery warnings, etc., are usually on a fixed interval you see. This mysterious chirping noise was on a
random interval, though: 183 seconds, 2329 seconds, 1104 seconds. And only one device has a random alert interval: the
Annoyatron, from ThinkGeek. Now that I knew what I was looking for, the rest was easy: just estimate the direction from where the sound was coming from, then ask myself: "where would I hide such a device?" And there I found it, behind the EXIT sign over the door.
Now I have the device. It's in my warm, vengeful hands. What shall I do with it?