I couldn’t help but remember J.K. Trotter’s charmingly neurotic old Gawker blog, “How to find a beeping smoke detector if you don’t know where it is.” His deciphering technique: Once you find the smoke detector where you expected to find it, keep looking for it in other places until you find it. I thought of it as my wife and I searched around the main floor of our house for a mysterious high-pitched sound. Trotter eventually found the smoke detector under the bathroom sink (!), behind a cabinet (!!), covered by a bag of sand (???), and nowhere near the sound. seeming They found that this phenomenon was due to the auditory properties of the alarm’s sound and the acoustic properties of their bathroom. (This is a great blog!)
It was a continuous, maddening, high-pitched sound, very different from the sound made by a smoke or carbon monoxide detector when it is actually triggered. We couldn’t figure out what was causing it; although it sounded vaguely like an alarm, it was clearly not the sound made by any of our alarms. It was coming from the bathroom, but like Trotter’s voice, not from any obvious point. In Bathroom.
Once we’d explored all the reasonable or explainable places to look for its origins, I actually had this idea in mind, OK, so now it’s time to look at the places that don’t make any sense.The simple and undeniable fact of the matter was that it was coming from somewhere. If it wasn’t coming from a sensible place, it was coming from a nonsensical place.
The problem was that, after opening all the cabinets and looking at anything that had space underneath them, the next most sensible thing to do was to look inside the wall. It seemed like the sound was coming from somewhere on or near the back wall of the bathroom, and we had already decided that wherever we found it, it wouldn’t make any sense. The most disgusting outcome would be that the sound would originate behind the wall, and then we’d have to cut a big horrible hole in the wall and fix whatever was making the sound and then patch and paint the wall, and we’d have to do it all within our home maintenance budget, which is currently exactly zero. So naturally that felt like where this story was going.
As a sort of desperate last resort — less to find the source of the sound, and more to console myself that I had exhausted every ridiculous possibility possible before inevitably and expensively hacking into the wall of my house — I moved a few things from the top of the toilet tank, and lifted the lid. instantly The sound grew louder. I bent down to bring my ear closer. It seemed to be coming from deep inside the toilet tank.
I’m not a plumber, but I have been a homeowner and toilet user for many years. I’ve repaired toilets and replaced their inner workings; I’ve had many opportunities to look at the mechanism of this particular toilet. If something were very different down there–if, say, for some reason it suddenly had an angry carbon-monoxide detector–I would have noticed it. Everything seemed normal. As far as I could tell, the only difference in the toilet from the last time I’d looked down there was that it was now screaming at me.
Listen. Sometimes the universe is kind to you. At such moments neither the wise nor the poor would dare question the system. If the ringing were not coming from inside the wall but from inside the toilet tank, perhaps the ringing could have been stopped by even the most stupid and inexpensive means. I flushed the toilet. The ringing stopped.
From cursory internet research, I learned that toilets can make noises when parts of the fill valve become old and worn, causing them to vibrate. Now I understand it in a far-fetched, informal way, like the “Huh. That’s interesting” with which you might respond when your child tells you an interesting fact about Jupiter’s moons. Huh. There’s liquid water on Europa, Huh. My toilet sounds like a phone sometimesThis is not my problem. It rings only sometimes.