I’m a moderator (admin? op?) on a very small IRC room. I always have at least one client running somewhere, usually on my Linux computer. Naturally I use XChat. Invariably someone will attempt to contact me via IRC when I’m not around, so I whipped together a quick little XChat plugin script that’ll send myself a Google Talk message when someone writes a highlighted phrase, such as my nickname. If I’m not busy, I can then pop on and see what they wanted. Hopefully it won’t be too annoying, I can always just turn it off (I know at least one of you reads this. I will most definitely ban you if you bother me at the wrong time 
).
Anyway, click the “read the rest of this entry” link for the script if you want to look at it.