My boss and I walked into one of our server rooms to look at a modem that was not working. This room also contains some machines used and maintained by the database group; we try not to touch their machines and let them take care of them.

As we walk in we hear a faint muffled sound, as if someone were speaking. It sounded vaguely like a telephone intercept message, so we figured maybe someone connected a telephone in the room and it was off hook.

As we tracked down the source of the problem, we found it. It was a newish machine which was sitting nestled among a bunch of older machines on the database group's rack.

I pressed my ear to it, and it was saying, repeatedly:

"Your keyboard and mouse may have a problem."

Nevermind that there was no keyboard and mouse even attached to the system; it was being used as a server. I went to talk to one of the database group managers and showed her the machine. She was as boggled as I was, and talked to her tech staff to come shut it up.

So yep, computers have talking BIOSes now. And they sound just like Jane Barbe.