AusAlert fired off yesterday

Yesterday at exactly 14:00 AEST, (almost) every phone in Australia got the following message from AusAlert: We’d been warned of this test for weeks, but the shrill siren sound still made me leap out of my skin! Mission accomplished. I was working at home with this spicy cough when it went off, but a friend working remote joked about how every phone went off at their local cafe at the same time. In kind of a weird way, it’s fun that we all had a shared experience. Them: Hey, Ruben! Where were you when AusAlert went off? I was enjoying a lovely lunch with a colleague! Me: Hey, you! I was hacking my lungs out from a secondary infection. Them: Nobody likes a buzzkill, Ruben. Me: Oh that’s not the half of it! I couldn’t even taste my black coffee! It’s tough being me. Them: It really isn’t. Me: Yeah, you’re right. Hey, do you run NetBSD? I’m well familiar with such alerts from being in Singapore and Japan, but it’s good to see we have a domestic capacity here now too. In the past alerts…