Sure, it’s all well and good to be on the frontlines of breaking national and international news. But the real top shelf journalism? That’s done deep in the trenches. Local news. Human interest stories. The buffer yarn that fills out the 30 seconds of airtime between the weather forecast and whatever bastard show comes on afterwards.
That’s real journalism there. Real meat-and-potatoes stuff.
And folks, it doesn’t get any meatier or any potatoier than this.
CBS Pittsburgh has gifted unto the world the story of Jerry Lynn (not the wrestler). A humble resident of Ross Township, Pennsylvania, who was faced with a slight home renovation issue: where to drill a hole in a lounge room wall to install a TV cable outlet.
Easy enough, right? Standard DIY fix?
Jerry has a dual storey house, and the outlet he wanted to install was on the ground floor.
No problems. That’s a little more complicated. But all he had to do was figure out where to fang into the wall and he’d be all sweet.
To do that, Jerry came up with the ingenious idea of tying an alarm clock to a piece of string, popping it down an upper-storey vent, dangling it inside the wall down to ground level, and then timing it so the alarm would set off. Where the thing would beep would be where he’d punch a badass hole in the wall and voila, maximum telly.
Only when he did it, the string broke, sending the clock plummeting into the wall where it became hopelessly, unrecoverably stuck.
With the alarm still on.
It’s been beeping inside the wall once a day, every day, for 10 minutes at a time.
For the past thirteen years.
Yes, dear old Jerry popped the clock into the wall back in 2004, and left it in there because he figured the batteries in the clock would only last a few months at the absolute most. Thus far, they’ve lasted 13 years and counting; the clock keeping meticulous, regimented time in the decade+ since, firing off an alarm deep inside the wall once a day ever since.
The resulting footage? Folks, it’s peak-local TV. Truly a thing of beauty. The journalistic art form at its absolute highest.
Maybe the beeping did actually cease years ago, but it lingers on in Jerry’s head like the beating of the hideous tell-tale heart.
Maybe poor Jerry is trapped inside his own mental prison, unable to escape the insidious beeping of his own creeping insanity.
Maybe the beeping is the sign of a man on the verge of cracking under the crushing weight of middle crass mediocrity; a vile and spectacular explosion triggered by a world that tells him he can do anything with one hand and bashes him into submission with the other.
Or maybe Jerry’s never once thought to crack the downstairs wall open and yank the clock out once and for all in the entire 13-year period of this ordeal.
Either way, 1 like = 1 prayer 4 Jerry.
Source: CBS Pittsburgh/YouTube.
