Alarm clock removed from family’s wall after more than 13 years

A buzzing alarm clock sounds bad enough when it means you need to wake up. But imagine sitting in your living room and relaxing…only to have an alarm goes off for no reason. At the same time every evening. For 13 years.

For the Lynn family in Pennsylvania, this was their reality. It all started more than 10 years ago when Jerry Lynn wanted to run a wire through the wall for his TV setup. Instead of blindly tearing up the wall, he decided to tie an alarm clock to a string and drop it through so he could pinpoint the best spot for drilling.

Unfortunately, his idea didn’t go exactly according to the plan.

“As I was laying it down, all of a sudden I heard it go ‘thunk!’ as it came loose,” he told Pittsburg’s KDKA. “I thought, well, that’s not a real problem. You know it’s still going to go off. And it did.”

Lynn told his wife, Sylvia, that the alarm clock would eventually stop going off. After all, how long could a battery last?

But who knew one tiny battery could keeping going for almost 14 years?

So every evening at 7:30 p.m. (6:50 p.m. during Daylight Savings Time), the alarm would sound. Luckily, the alarm clock shut itself off after a certain period of time. Still, you’d think that incessant beeping would drive a family crazy after a while.

Fortunately, and at long last, this story got a quiet, happy ending!

According to the Associated Press, a local heating and air conditioning company heard about the Lynn family’s daily nuisance. The workers decided that the alarm clock’s time needed to officially end. So Keith Andreen and Dawn Michelucci of Low-Cost Heating and Air Conditioning came to the rescue. The employees went to the Lynn home, went through a garage vent and (finally!) got rid of the clock.

The original battery, totally corroded after more than a decade, still managed to give the clock the juice it needed to keep ticking. Now that’s a long-life battery!