Daily Times

A family is being tormented by an alarm clock that has been stuck behind a wall for 13 years and goes off every single day.

Jerry and Sylvia Lynn have lived more than a decade with his living room wall constantly ringing after the clock got wedged in there in 2004.

Their ordeal all started when Jerry wanted to drill a hole for a TV cable in their home in Ross Township, Pennsylvania.

Unsure where to drill, he got the clever idea to tie the clock to a piece of string and drop it down a second-storey air vent and listen for its sound. Jerry explained he programmed the alarm to go off every 10 minutes to give him time to go downstairs and listen at the hollow wall.

But his plan quickly turned from ingenious to disastrous when he heard the clunk of the clock coming loose.

He told CBS Pittsburgh, “All of a sudden I heard it go ‘thunk!’ as (the clock) came loose.

“I thought, well, that’s not a real problem… It’s still going to go off. And it did.”

But despite thinking its battery life would drain in “three (or) four months”, the clock is still going strong today.

“That was in September of 2004. It is still going off every day. During daylight savings time it goes off at ten minutes until eight, and during standard time it goes off at ten minutes to seven at night,” he said.

Sylvia said the clock can sometimes put visitors on edge because the beeps get progressively louder, but the couple is used to it themselves. Jerry did admit he probably could have cut into the wall to retrieve the lost clock years ago, but he says he has now gotten used to the regular beeps.

Published in Daily Times, June 21st, 2017.