Where I work we have an alarm system which uses WAV files as the actual alarms. There’s a different WAV file depending on what has happened.
One day a few years ago we decided to mess about with the WAVs, replacing them with alternatives.
For one of them we replaced the default with a sound clip from The League of Gentlemen. It was this…
“Hello DAVE!, Is that DAVE?.. No, sorry there’s no-one called dave here”
A few days later we came to work to find a very angry Boss. The alarm had gone off early on, and the door to the room where the alarm is located is locked (as a rule) by us, and we are the only ones with the keys to open it.
The Boss had to sit in his office (next door) while the above sound clip played repeatedly for about five hours!
He was, well, not amused.
Thinking back on it - I found it amusing.
edit: Here is a youtube clip containing the relevant bit…
We had the windows DING replaced with “DOH!”. So every time we lost a track link the system would go DOH!. Sometimes all tracks go at once … DOH DOH DOH DOH DOH DOH DOH!
OK.
Long ago, I was at a restaurant with my family. My burger came, and I tried to put some ketchup on it with the squeeze bottle. No ketchup came out, so I assumed the nozzle was clogged, and unscrewed it, and just poured some ketchup out. I then put the top on loosely, so that everyone else at the table could do the same thing. My sister takes the bottle, squeezes, and no ketchup comes out. Before anyone could say anything, she takes both hands, and squeezes with all her strength. Of course, the top came off, and about a pint of ketchup went SPLAT! all over her food (and clothes). I started to laugh my head off. Even my folks thought it was funny. She was screaming “He did that on purpose!” (which I didn’t).
Hilarious!
I am a Skywarn net ops for our NWS office here. They used to do the same thing with their AWIPS (Automated Weather Information Processing System) when it detected rotation on the radar feed. Our office has 8 or 9 terminals which are always on, so imagine all of them going off with some WAV alarm (like the fweeee! sound, or Star Trek Red Alert klaxon) whenever a rotation signature came up. I cracked up a few times when I was there running WX4NWS.
Ironically, the default alarms on our system all use the star-trek red-alert claxon. (followed by the voice of a well-known employee of the company that built the system saying what the error is - such as “warning - A concentrator is down” in the voice of a bad actor reading a script. It’s horrible, so we make extra effort to reslove whatever is triggering the alarm)
Nobody pointed it out. The Boss in question was a person I didn’t particularly like.
If he had been me he would have been intelligent enough to figure out a solution.
(Such as, for [to give one] example, go upstairs to the IT dept/staff, explain the situation, get a key off them, turn down or switch off the alarm)
I guess his attitude was that the ‘funny’ alarm was unprofessional, while the ‘offical’ alarm would be tolerable because it was not funny.
