“Random” evidently has become synonymous with “unknown” – a frightener for girls describing an encounter with a guy. As the father of three daughters, I admit that this is very scary!
It turns out that I keep a random guy in my office. His name is “Clocky” (see picture). He goes off at proscribed (not random) times, but even though I control this, it always scares me. You see, Clocky was diabolically designed to be most annoying. First he jumps off his shelf. Then he whistles and squeaks while moving at alarming speed in random directions. One day I left work early before Clocky went berserk. This caused quite a commotion at the Stat-Ease office before one of our programmers deciphered the sequence of buttons required to defuse this runaway terminator of peace and quiet.
For the story of the MIT student who invented this clock with a built-in microprocessor that randomly programs its runaway speed and routes, see this article from the Boston Globe . Clocky can be purchased from Think Geek. (I got mine as a gift from my geeky gadget-loving younger brother.) Their web site for Clocky features a video of some random guy wearing a “Toxic Waste” shirt.
Wouldn’t it be nice if alarm clocks could be banished? Making one act randomly is either a stroke of genius or a criminal act – I cannot decide which.