Thinking about all the folks on call for the Black Friday/Cyber Monday crush. They were some of my favorite days working in e-commerce but, then again, everything always went smoothly during my tenure. Thanks for holding down the fort for the rest of us!
I've been in that trench too. I'm thankful to be out of it, and able to enjoy the festivities without always having an ear out for that PagerDuty ringtone.
(EAS tones, I always used, the SAME FSK chirps followed by the attention tone. Wake the dead, that will. If you never want to miss a page again - and never want anyone in earshot to doubt it's important, besides - give it a try! Bonus side effect: you'll immediately be in the correct frame of mind if the real balloon ever goes up.)
Oh, I don't need to check, I looked it up ages ago while I was implementing my SAME encoder. It's definitely that frequency pair, and they're deliberately chosen to be exactly as unpleasant when mixed as they are.
Wow, SAME is very interesting. (I live in Australia and have never been exposed to a comparable system. I think the closest we have is an SMS-based thing.)
With the advent of wireless emergency messaging, EAS no longer has the ubiquity even here that its predecessor the Emergency Broadcast System did in my childhood.
With TV at that time offering in many places, my childhood home included, only about a dozen analog VHF and UHF channels many if not all of which participated in the system, you were all but guaranteed to see and hear a system test sooner or later - I might have been five or six the first time I did, and it frightened me so badly that I ran and found my mother.
As mentioned in the README to that project, there's a smallish and somewhat creepypasta-adjacent Youtube subgenre of fictional EAS messages, and I've wondered sometimes if experiences similar to mine are where that found its genesis. If video content hasn't all moved to VR by a couple decades from now, I wonder if we'll still see the like being made.
