June 19: A homeowner outside Pittsburgh, Penn., has a rather jolting daily reminder of a construction mistake he made nearly 13 years ago. CBS Pittsburgh reports that Jerry Lynn of Ross Township accidentally dropped an alarm clock between the walls during a home improvement project in the fall of 2004.
Though it’s been 13 years, the clock beeps every evening at 6:50pm (unless it’s daylight saving time, when the beeping starts an hour later).
Back in 2004, Lynn set the alarm for 10 minutes later, then lowered the clock through a second-floor vent via a string. The plan was for the alarm to go off, once lowered to the first floor, as a signal for where Lynn needed to drill a hole through his living room wall for a TV hookup. Instead, the clock detached from the string, leaving Ross unable to lift it back through the vent.
“As I was laying it down, all of a sudden I heard it go ‘thunk’ as it came loose,” he says, adding that he figured “maybe three, four months, it’ll run out of battery.”
But the clock has been ticking faithfully since, with a distinctive beep that can be heard in CBS Pittsburgh’s video around the :25 second mark.
Though the Lynn family has grown accustomed to the daily alarm, Jerry’s wife Sylvia told CBS Pittsburgh that it still throws off guests. “It starts with a soft ‘beep, beep, beep, beep,’ and it gets louder and closer together. And that will set people like, ‘What is that?’”
- Newser.com