My company gave me a Treo that's hooked up to my office email. I literally get 4,000 or so emails a day, and after heavy filtering with the incredibly pinheaded Outlook filtering rules, I can still be getting two email alerts a minute, on average.
It took me two weeks to find the magic handshake that makes it not tell me about alerts. So imagine this. It can't be turned off (it can be put to sleep, but that's not the same). When the was sound is on, it kept chiming all the time. If I turned the sound off, it did this death-rattle vibrating buzz. I could take it offline so it wouldn't get the alerts, but then putting it back online (say to dial 911?) it would lock up doing chimes or death-rattles for 20 minutes while it received a huge backlog of email alerts. So during those first couple of weeks, I gave my new Treo a nickname:
ALF, the Angry Little F***er.
This caught on with friends and family pretty quickly.
