» Messing with people's heads

Annoy-a-tron tomfoolery
There is a good friend of mine who shall remain nameless who is the butt of many a jape in the name of comedy; since I have known him we have committed petty acts of tomfoolery such as subscribing him to various free adult contact magazines or stealing his remote control doorbell button to be operated from the nearby curry house. The level of humour this poor fellow has had to put up with has got to the point that, when his car was stolen from his drive, he actually walked round to my house to see if it vanishing was part of a comedic ruse...

When he was finely encouraged to move into his new house, a whole bunch of his friends would pop in to ooh and aah at his new abode; and a fine pad it is too. Being a very diligent individual (as he works in insurance) he invested heavily in builders, plumbers and electricians to fix all the minor niggles pointed out in the various surveys he had commissioned during the purchasing process.

Whilst all of this was going on, I had recently been the lucky purchaser of a couple of Annoy-a-trons from ThinkGeek. These tasty little gadget would emit a high pitched chirp (similar to that which might be heard from any number of electrical gadgets) at random intervals, infrequent enough to prevent one from identifying the source but loud and frequent enough to be damn annoying - the product name in this instance was spot-on.

I secreted one of them in the kitchen, behind the radiator, and another in his bedroom, again behind the radiator - and quickly made my excuses and left.

I can only imagine what a fun night Andrew (ooops, damn there is his name) had lying in bed listening to the occasional chirp from electrical devices unknown, but I do know that he instructed the electrical and plumbing contractors he had employed for the next few days to forget what they were working and find the source of the noise...

I think it took about 8 hours until the first was discovered, and only a short time following for the second - and it only cost him the hourly rate of 2 contractors @ 8 hours a piece....
(Sun 15th Jan 2012, 15:03, More)