Deals.Woot

@maskeddummy: Then the question is: Do you have an elderly relative who is positively adamant they can manage on their own any time a whiff of a hint about assisted living pops up, yet calls you a dozen times a week for a favor or just to talk your ear off?

Sometimes technology works wonders where rational discussion fails.

@ciabelle: Oh, yeah? We finally succeeded in getting our elderly parents to an assisted living a year ago. I want you to know that SOMETHING had been beeping for weeks in their house...and since they couldn't find it, they chose to ignore it. (We now think it was a fire alarm battery going bad in their basement but since it was a ranch, we couldn't seem to pinpoint it as in every room it sounded the same.) We've found that when something confuses or mystifies them, they deal with it by ignoring it. Good luck.

Had two experiences with these.

1) tried the original model, as linked here. The target was in a room that had loud, horrible ventilation noise. They didn't even notice it.

2) next time around we upped our game, and bought the spooky version that made ghost noises. Add some photoshopped "news articles" about how the hotel we were in was built on the site of the "atlanta child murders," and you have an EPIC win.

One of our coworkers had two of these. First he placed it underneath a shelf in a metallic bookshelf that stood in a room where 5 programmers do their work (me being one of them). That went on for a month and a half. We had the boss actually bring in an HVAC guy because we thought it MIGHT be coming from the vents. Then he decided to up his game and when he went to lunch with us, he'd drop one in one of our cars. I thought I was being bugged (I work for the feds). Then the next time he'd go to lunch with us, he'd remove it and put it in someone elses car. Finally after a few months of this, he decided to let us in on it. He gained newfound respect from all of us. The one douche on our team took the annoyatron and snapped it in half. :(

i alwys wanted to but one of these...i heard the annoyatron 2 is better..supposed to have more sounds and a longer battery.. check it out

A friend of mine had a brilliant idea. He proposed buying five of them, and hiding them in someone's office (someone he didn't particularly like, obviously). Before hiding them, he would number them: 1, 2, 3, 5, 6. Even if they found all five, the paranoia and twitching would continue because they'd still keep searching for 4.

I have one of these with a cricket sound on it. (used it last night on a passenger in my car... pretended I could not hear it) I also hid it in a metal file cabinet in a co-worker's office. It drove her crazy! I did not know that she had a phobia of crickets when I put it in there. I would sneak in every other day and move it. I only removed it when she hired a company to come out and spray for pests. Mine also has a high pitched frequency that most older people can not hear. I hid it in a room where there is only one person who could hear it. She was asking everyone around her if they could hear it and of course none of them can. It was a few weeks before someone else was in the room and heard it as well. She thought she was going crazy!