Jerry Lynn of Ross Township, Pennsylvania, had a great idea that turned bizarre. He tied a battery-powered alarm clock to a string and lowered it through a vent into a wall, in order to determine where he should install a cable outlet for his TV. The alarm was set to go off in a few minutes, and he would drill the hole near the sound, ensuring that a cable would have an unobstructed path. Surely there are better ways of doing that, but the plan seemed sound. Until the string broke. The clock fell too far down to be retrieved.
“As I was laying it down, all of a sudden I heard it go ‘thunk!’ as it came loose,” he said. “I thought, well, that’s not a real problem. You know it’s still going to go off. And it did.”
He couldn’t pull it back up, but figured, “Maybe, three-four months it’ll run out of battery. That was in September of 2004. It is still going off every day. And during daylight savings time it goes off at ten minutes ’til eight. And during standard time it goes off at ten minutes to seven at night.”
Clocks do not draw much power from a battery, but the longest I've had one last is six years. This one has been ringing daily for 13 years. I would have torn the wall apart by now. -via Boing Boing
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Dozens of ways to get it out easily and quickly. A strong magnet on a string lowered into the same cavity would attach and lift it out. A small hole cut out of the wall would allow removing it, and if you're not in the mood for patching, a blank electrical plate would cover it for the time being. Heck, you know where it is, start drilling holes until you skewer and disable it! Pretty absurd that somebody would decide to put up with it for years, rather than a trivial effort.
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This has a faint odor of fake news. Once the location for a cable run was located, a hole large enough for a standard wall plate would have been cut. That would have easily given enough space to tape the cord to the clock and retrieve it.
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That's just daft. A cut in the dry wall big enough to retrieve the alarm, and a simple patch job would have taken care of it when it first happened.
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