You might remember how Ned came to me with this asinine request for an all-purpose alarm system for the office.  It took all of my leet skillz to make it happen.  And I thought I had it all working until the servers crashed and I lost all my work.  By the way, if you ever tell anyone I didn’t have it backed up, I’ll mess your email up in ways even I can’t fix.  Just so we’re clear.

Anyway even though Ned had insisted on giving me all the alarm sounds himself I had nothing anymore, and if I went back to him to ask to re-record them, he’d figure out that I’d lost them.  So even though I’d built a sweet iPhone app for Ned to trigger over 40 different types of alarms over our office PA system, I was two days away from go-live with no viable alarm sounds.  My entire house of punchcards was about to come crashing down on me.

Then I heard it.

I wasn’t originally sure I knew who it was, but after listening for several minutes I figured out it was Mallory, one of the new folks over in Operations.  She must have been practicing scales or something, but she was singing in the supply closet.  Suddenly, I had a flash of inspiration.  I grabbed a digital audio recorder and captured it all.  And back at my desk, I worked my magic.  A little reverb here and we had our Toxic Gases alarm.  A little backmasking there and voila, we had our Escaped Animal alert.  After just three hours of taking the same few sounds, working and blending them, I was done.  Then I could finally work on installing those security patches Microsoft’s been telling me about the last few weeks.

Later, as I was demoing the system for the office, I was cycling through the alarms and explaining each one.  Everyone seemed pretty impressed until the very end when Tom spoke up.  ”That’s great work, Brad, but what’dja do to get those alarms?  Record Mallory singing and just mess with the sound board settings?  How hard could that have been?”

I am fail.  Hear me squeak.

I usually believe I’ve got the best job in the entire office.  The vast majority of the time, nobody cares what I do and leaves me alone.  On the increasingly rare occasions, Chip goes to some naughty website or Jan is gambling offshore and we get a virus in the system.  Email goes down for a day or so, I get it all put back together again, and voila, I’m the man.  Everyone can return to their regular daily activities.  And by that, I mean leaving me the hell alone.

Unfortunately, when Ned got his big promotion to company-wide Emergency Preparedness Coordinator, I had no idea it was going to infringe on my hard-won sense of insulation from the daily goings-on at Doogleheimer & Schmitt.  Last week he waltzed into my server room where I was patiently schooling a bunch of nooblings on the fine art of corpsehumping and asked if I could help him with emergency preparedness.  After a few minutes of talking to Ned, I realized that “help him” really meant “do everything”.   He wanted a system rigged up through the company’s computers that would allow him to use his iPhone to trigger alerts at any Doogleheimer & Schmitt branch office based on the type of emergency.

So I start worlking on creating a VPN tunnel via IPsec whose configuration would match the protocol that … never mind.  Let’s just say it was hard, but I did it.  I brought Ned in to test it out for him.

“Watch,” I said.  And I took his iPhone out of his hand and casually set off the fire alarm.

“That’s great,” he replied as the staff filed out the door and down into the parking lot.  ”What else you got?”

“What do you mean, ‘what else’?  This is the thing you wanted.”

“No, no,” Ned shook his head as the fireflighters passed by the door to the server room.  ”I need something for every emergency.  I mean everything.”

“What, like tornadoes?”

“Yes, but not just that.  I need tornadoes and floods and air raids and alien landings and zombie rampages and civil uprisings and cholera outbreaks and typhoon warnings … You know, the usual stuff.”

I was nonplussed.  We spent the next two days in the server room with me sampling Ned’s voice as he invented sounds for each of no fewer than thirty different warnings, alerts, and sirens.  Then I had to digitize all those sounds and clean up the audio by running it through a high-compression bandpass filter with … never mind.  Let’s just say it was really hard and you’d never have been able to do it.

So now we have it: Ned’s Omni-Purpose Emergency Warning Apparatus.  Sucks to be us, I suppose.  Oh, and I’d better get moving, the Endangered Species siren is going off, and I’ve only got thirty seconds to evacuate the office before Greenpeace storms in.

FML.