In today's world, the culprit will probably be found, expelled and jailed for 20 years
>Cornell Police Deputy Chief David Honan said CUPD had received no reports regarding the devices.
tl;dr Redditor puts annoyatron in Canadian office. Someone finds it and thinks it might be an espionage device, so sends pictures to the RCMP. RCMP thinks it might be a bomb, sweeps the building. OP somehow doesn't get fired.
Obviously it's a reddit story, so take it with a few grains of salt.
Also, is there such a thing as a low power trigger that can turn on a device that consumes more power? I guess I could google that up.
Some MCUs also include a built-in realtime clock peripheral, often with options for running it off a separate backup power supply such as a coin cell. Those RTC peripherals can often serve the same 'wakeup' functionality without even using an external pin. So the device can setup its RTC, set an alarm for a week in the future, and then go into a very low-power sleep mode.
For example, the STM32F030 or 031 would work, although their 32-bit 48MHz cores would be overkill for this application. But they are ultra-low-power ARM Cortex-M0+ which includes an onboard RealTime Clock peripheral and consumes like 5uA in deep sleep. I think TI's MSP432 lines are even more power efficient, but I don't know much about those chips.