Years ago, I was working in the system administration department of some company where another system administrator had gone a bit overboard with the various monitor scripts he had installed. Not only would the sysadmin be paged and emailled if there was a problem, but also his workstation (in case of a server problem), or the workstation of a developer (in case of a problem with his/her computer) would speak. I wasn't so pleased as his desk was right behind mine. (I made it a habit to remotely turn down his volume if his computer would speak while he was away of his desk). And the developers often got a scare if their swap-space/tmp dir filled up (this was Solaris), because then their workstation would vocally complain. Once I ran an at job - sceduled to run while I was out of the office - that remotely filled up everybody's /tmp directory to slightly over treshold that triggered the spoken warning. Steathely (open file, unlink file, write file, wait for warning, closely). Too bad I wasn't there to see the faces of the developers amid 100 talking workstations. (We had cubicles - with low walls).