Last night my coworkers and I gathered for an evening of food, booze, and cards.

Typically we convene at a Reno casino which has NOT barred me from playing blackjack, and hunker down at the tables for a stupefying number of hours. It's consistently entertaining, but sometimes we lose our shirts and pay a steep price for that entertainment. So this time we decided to change things a bit. My boss has a timeshare condo in Tahoe, so we converged there for an evening of moderate debauchery.

I brought my Nintendo Wii along for some entertainment (much to the chagrin of my wife and child who were cruelly left Wii-less for 24 hours. The horror!), my boss cooked up a mess of tasty vittles, and we drank a variety of hangover-inducing beverages. The main activity of the evening was a poker tournament though. This way we'd still get to gamble, like always, but instead of giving our money to the casino, we'd give it to me. It was a win win!

At some point during the card-playing, one of my coworkers noticed that something had been intermittently beeping. We paused and listened for another beep, but none occurred. Several minutes later it happened again. This went on, sporadically, for a good chunk of the evening, with members of our gathering getting increasingly annoyed. It was kind of a high-pitched squeaky beep, one of the more dastardly species in the beep genus.

I have a special hatred for beeping objects. They plague me. So, it was exceedingly annoying having this beep intervene into our festivities. We contemplated all possible sources: iPods, laptops, Pablo's bionic hip, Wiis, appliances, and people who had beans for lunch.

"Argh!" yelled one of our coworkers, "What is making that beeping!?"

Pablo broke out into a sneaky little grin.

"That," he said quietly, "Is the Annoy-a-tron. It's currently affixed to the underside of that lamp table."

He hobbled over to the table and retrieved his dastardly little toy for us all to marvel/spit at, a device whose sole purpose is to annoy people like me. I go to great efforts to annoy the people around me, and this device accomplishes the same thing with the touch of a button. It's a genius time-saving machine.

Me thinks that some lucky people will be unknowingly receiving the Annoy-a-tron for next Winter Present Tree Day.