StarDestroyer.Net BBS

The Annoy-a-Tron

So you're happily working one day, in your office or wherever, when all of a sudden you hear a quick beep out of nowhere. Mildly distracted, you go back to your work. Several minutes later, it happens again. You try to locate the source of the sound but to no avail. Minutes pass. It happens again. And so on...

You're being attacked by the Annoy-a-Tron. Which one of your enemies would be vengeful (and nerdy) enough to be the cause of this? You must not give in. You must not go crazy. You must defeat the Annoy-a-Tron.

Here's the setup:
Somewhere in your office or home office or equivalent place where you spend a lot of time, someone has hidden an Annoy-a-Tron. It has infinite battery life and cannot be found by means of a conventional search. You will have to precisely locate it using alternate methods in order to disable it. Of course, nuking the entire place from orbit is an option too. Your reward if you find it? The name of the evil bastard who planted the thing, so you can take your sweet, sweet revenge.

How would you do it? Creative and outlandishly complex solutions encouraged!

Work office - I let security handle it. However did it will be losing their job, and will be facing jail time.

Stuff like that in a Federal office is highly discouraged.

At home - Remove all electronics from the area, right up a EMP device, and set it off. That will nicely take care of it.

Ahh, but where are you going to get this EMP device? And imagine you're security and you have to find the damn thing. What do you do (short of tearing up the floorboards, so to speak)?

Set up multiple microphones/dB meters around the office to triangulate its location.

Edit: directional microphones would be better; you could get higher accuracy by simply rotating them until the read is highest to get each ones bearing, instead of trying to correct for noise attenuation from different objects in the way.

I fake my own sucide. The note will claim I was driven over the edge by a beeping noise that wouldn't stop. The guilty party will undoubtably have some sort of breakdown out of guilt, which I will be looking for while carefully monitoring everyone in disguise. Then, having discovered who it was, I torture the location out of him with my best Jack Bauer techniques, I rob him of all his senses except hearing, then tie him to a chair inside a shipping crate with the device, letting him go slowly mad.

Being used to playing the "Find the beeping UPS/alarm/whatever in a goddamn server room using binaural hearing because I'm a human being" game, it probably takes me about 6 beeps to home in on it once I set my mind to it.

At that point it's simply one hammer away from death.

And the person who planted it? Good for them for wasting their money.

Borrow one of the explosives & drug sniffing dogs from my work and put it to work to sniff this thing out.
Either that or it'll hear where the noise is coming from and point me to the source.

Isolate noise levels via doors: if it sounds less loud, I have blocked it. This will pinpoint the room. Repeat with drawers and closet doors.

I can repeat this by setting up small walls and curtains. It will take a LONG TIME and some patience, but since you said that we can't just simply search for it...
I'll also prod around with a telescopic-magnet.

I live in a shared house, which simplifies things a bit. There's a limited number of places it could be hidden in my room, which is pretty small, so that'd take me about ten minutes to locate. (And rectally insert in whoever thought this was a good prank to play on a guy with paper-thin walls and a next-door neighbour with severe learning difficulties, I might add.)

And I own a set of very nice Active Noise Reduction headphones, which I regularly wear at work. I might not even notice it there.

I can barely hear as it is so I'd do nothing.

I work outside and/or around noise alot.

I had one of these in my desk at my last workplace. I left it wedged behind the stack of file cabinets the day they fired me.

I'd go with the orbital nuclear bombardment option. The planet will be left an irradiated mess, incapable of supporting life for hundreds of years, but come on, it WAS annoying, right?
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Right?

Solauren wrote:Work office - I let security handle it. However did it will be losing their job, and will be facing jail time.

Stuff like that in a Federal office is highly discouraged.

At home - Remove all electronics from the area, right up a EMP device, and set it off. That will nicely take care of it.

Nah I work in a federal office and they pull this type of crap all the time including rubber band fights. Sad everyone in the offices holds mutiple degrees and a security clearance and their reduce to juvenille antics.

Until the location was made known to me, I would simply start shooting people out of hand. With a Nerf gun.

dragon wrote:

Solauren wrote:Work office - I let security handle it. However did it will be losing their job, and will be facing jail time.

Stuff like that in a Federal office is highly discouraged.

At home - Remove all electronics from the area, right up a EMP device, and set it off. That will nicely take care of it.

Nah I work in a federal office and they pull this type of crap all the time including rubber band fights. Sad everyone in the offices holds mutiple degrees and a security clearance and their reduce to juvenille antics.

Thank you for illustrating the difference between US and Canadian civil service.