“Hey!”
Startled awake, I jumped up. I could hear someone coming in through my unlocked front door.
“Hey, wake your butt up.”
It was Lennie, an old friend of over forty years. I should have remembered he was coming over and not finished off that pint of Black Velvet last night. Surprisingly, I didn’t feel too bad. It was a quiet Sunday in the middle of January, 2013.
We had the habit of getting together most Sundays and either played guitars or relived old memories. Part of the reliving was sorting through old audio cassette tapes of years past. Recordings we made in both Wisconsin and North Dakota were an endless source of amusement. The best of the cassettes were of Lennie and me plunking on guitars together. We were killers in those days, murdering songs left and right. He was a huge Elvis fan and also liked Jim Croce, who I also came to enjoy because of Jim’s colorful characterizations in song.
I put on some strong, black coffee for myself.
We sat in what I call my computer room and were several hours into sorting and listening to music. As intent as we were, a sound crept into our consciousness. At first it sounded like some alarm outside the house, just seeping in through the walls. When we focused, it became obvious that it was coming from within the house and seemed to be within the very room we were occupying. We both agreed we heard it, no sense in just one of us being crazy.
We had a lot of electronics running, so the logical approach for two men trained in electrical and computer troubleshooting, was to localize the source of the sound. That simply meant, shutting off each piece of electronic equipment in turn, until the annoying noise disappeared. I wasn’t completely sure I wanted to find the source. That would mean something else was breaking down and lead to cost. When I think about my spending habits, it can be said I’m past frugal into cheap.
The room was now electronically dead. The sound, still present, commenced to be slightly ominous in our minds.
“So, bright boy”, Lennie quipped, “What else you got running”?
“Nothing, oh wait, a clock radio in the bedroom”.
I went to the radio and turned it off. Then to be doubly sure, I unplugged it.
In the computer room again, I rubbed my head.
“Okay, that got us nowhere.” “Here’s what I suggest. I know what’s in my house. I’ll walk through and find out what the sound is.”
Checking each second story room and not hearing as dominant a sound volume, I descended to the first floor. Hearing an immediate decrease in the presence of the increasingly mysterious sound, which we now considered a warning; I hurriedly examined the first floor, the garage, and the basement.
I discovered nothing. What to do? Start over. The first thing I had to consider was my diminished hearing. From being in popular music bands and working in noisy industries, most of my high frequency hearing in both ears was compromised. The answer was easy. Get Lennie, he has better hearing and together we would search the house again.
Back in the computer room for a second time, the sound was still there. Lennie confirmed it had been consistently present during my search.
“Your ears are better. Let’s go back through the house and see what you can discover.” He had a smirk on his face, so I knew where his thoughts were going. I quickly interjected, “I also don’t want to hear anything about my age; I’m only one year older than you.” After forty years, people learn how to poke sticks at each other without raising hackles. It keeps us grounded.
We started out slowly, not wanting to miss a clue. The stairwell to the first floor was a left turn and down, upon exiting the computer room. We continued descending slowly until we were halfway down the stairs. I was in front, with Lennie one or two steps above and behind me. My head was just below his waistline. The sound was really loud.
“Stop!”, I cautioned.
“What do you hear?”, Lennie answered.
“It’s really loud here.”
We pressed our ears to the wall, the other side of which was the garage. Previously the garage was dead quiet. Nothing had changed. I pulled my ear off the wall and looked questioningly at Lennie.
I had to state what was becoming obvious, “It sounds like you’re humming or something.” My words sounded like an accusation.
We looked at each other for a few seconds more, and then Lennie broke out in a grin of embarrassment. He stuck his left hand in his left pocket and brought out a small electronic guitar tuner. That device was emitting our sound!
Lennie sometimes had illogical things happen to him. Oddly, he would get calls from local 911 operators asking what he wanted. He explained he didn’t call, but they verified his caller ID. Knowing he didn’t call, he decided that even with a locked phone keypad, he was somehow, ‘butt dialing’. That’s one he never figured out.
Our mystery was solved! We examined the tuner and discovered it was stuck in A440 standard tuning mode using an audible tone.
When we stopped laughing, at us two old farts making a mountain out of a molehill, we settled back down to enjoy the rest of our visit.
Occasionally, we broke out chuckling.