One of life's greatest joys, other than yoga for men, is the practical joke. It combines ingenuity and humiliation with the added bonus of making you look a little bit smarter than the person you just punked. I was a notorious prankster in college, where my favorite joke involved dumping a bucket of cold water over the bathroom stall door and onto someone taking a dump. Good times, goot times...

Those days are long gone, however, and I've found that practical jokery in the workplace has to be a little bit more, well, subtle. And that's where the Annoy-a-tron comes in.

"This'll teach you to use my coffee mug, bitch."
This nefarious little device is tiny (2.5" x 1.25" x .3") and has an embedded magnet, so you can hide it pretty much anywhere that anything is. It then generates a short beep every few minutes. Even better, the beeps vary in intervals ranging from 2 to 8 minutes, which should make the noise harder to anticipate and (therefore) harder to find.

So plant the Annoy-a-tron, sit back, relax, practice your "muwahahahaha"-style laughter, and wait for your friend/co-worker/family member/hated rival to go slowly but surely insane.

Labels: Annoy-a-tron, Christmas list, practical jokes