Originally published at: Prank beeping device now eviler than ever | Boing Boing
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Tell me you’re a sociopath without saying “I am a sociopath”.
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mark worked it out…
“Best thing I’ve bought, my parents are going insane”
This is a valid reason to disinherit your child, right? It’s the last laugh that counts.
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Total useless, couldn’t hear a thing.* My kids would be severely disappointed if they brought this to prank me. On the other hand the dog might go crazy and I wouldn’t know why. . .
*Note I have high frequency hearing loss due to sound/noise exposure, age and genetics.
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Even evilier would be a version with even higher frequency, so only dogs would ear the sound.
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Pranks are shitty. An amusing common feature of Youtube prank videos is when the perp, confronted by the angry victim, says, “Bro, it’s a prank”, like that’s somehow mitigating. Yeah, it’s a prank. You’re an asshole.
I may have told the story before of a guy I know who perpetrated the rare non-asshole prank. He was invited to a dinner party and showed up with a large potted plant as a gift for the hosts. After dinner, he fixated on the plant and eventually started eating the soil, which turned out to be chocolate cake.
Another of the few non-obnoxious pranks, which I learned about here on BoingBoing, was when Jamie Kennedy set up a fake Hollywood tour bus and tricked the unsuspecting customers into following him as he broke into Bob Saget’s house. They had some tense moments, but then got to hang out with Bob Saget and all laugh about it.
But, for the most part, pranks are a much less well hidden form of aggression than the perpetrators pretend it is. Pranks suck.
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My buddy put a similar device deep inside a production truck, it made random sounds like beeping or crickets. I spent an hour going through it to find the problem (when gear is hot, it beeps… it isn’t something that can be ignored). Yeah, I wasn’t amused.
Few days later, I locked the two of us in the audio booth and I let one rip that tore the fabric of space & time (almost my pants too). I ate certain foods to ensure it wouldn’t be pleasant. It was horrific, our eyes were watering. Reap what you sow.
Ahhh, the fun back in those days.
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i think if you have to explain that, then it’s a shitty prank. the best ones are where both parties laugh when the prank is revealed.
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Yes, definitely pranks that aren’t evil exist, but this device sounds awful, doesn’t it?
At best, it’ll stress someone out and distract them from anything else they’d rather be doing. At worst, it will cost them sleep or cause a car crash by distracting them while driving or something. I don’t see what’s funny about any of it. Better to stick with pranks like your friend’s, where it surprises someone instead of torturing them.
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I’ve have a couple of the original Annoy-A-Trons from thinkgeek for about 12 years.
They’ve been random for years.
My daughter found it pretty quick years ago but she knows what to expect from me. We don’t visit inside their small apartment lately but when we start again I’ll have to hide one and see if she remembers. Her husband should find it amusing, or not, doesn’t matter, I won’t be there. The fun part is waiting for her to get me back, I raised her right. We torment each other constantly.
Annoy-A-Trons are like trying to figure out which smoke detector has a low battery but 1000 times worse.
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A funnier and less evil version of this prank:
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I don’t need a fancy device for this. I already have 6 of them installed in my house…
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I used one of these on a co-worker last April Fool’s Day, and the end result was he called the tech guys to ask why his computer was beeping all the time. Thankfully they didn’t visit and find the device.
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Well, in pandemic times, since nobody shakes hands anymore, the joy buzzer is no longer selling like it used to.
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Yes, I had an annoy-a-tron from ThinkGeek too! Stashed it in my brother’s trailer home. He was tormented for hours but admitted it was a pretty good prank in the end!
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An elderly professor friend of mine begged me to come over and help him a dozen or so years ago: “Please help me find and destroy the source of this nightmare!” Somewhere in his notably cluttered apartment there was a constant loud tinny rendition of Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer. It is said that short high pitched tones are the most difficult to locate - or that’s what an ornithologist colleague told me - and this was a real bugger to find. Took the better part of an hour to sector down the apartment to which side it was surely coming from. In the end, halfway down a stack of Smithsonian magazines, an Absolut Vodka ad was endlessly playing it. I could only just barely stop the prof from shoving it down his garbage disposal before i could remove the surprisingly long-lived battery. ((it ended up in the faculty lounge))
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Whatever happened to good old-fashioned non-torturous pranks, like filling your colleague’s office to the ceiling with Ping-Pong balls?
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Back in university days, I used to fill a friend’s locker in the kitchen with cornflakes. Lots of them. It still makes me laugh today to remember his face, both the first and the nth time he opened it to a cascade of cereal. Popcorn is also good - lots of volume.
He was just as annoying to me. He boiled my eggs, and put them back in the fridge, more than once. Good times.
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