Things that go Ping! in the Night

Things that go ‘ping’ in the night!

By Tony Fernandes

It’s late. We’re just about to retire for the night. My wife has just finished watching her favourite late comedy show. The TV is off and she’s about to walk up the steps to the bedroom when she hears a shrill but soft 'ping-ping' sound in the corridor that turns right to go up to the bedroom. She frantically tries to pinpoint the abnormal eerie sound. I’m awake up in the bedroom when I hear my wife calling out to me and asking me whether I can hear any high-pitched sound. I reply that I can’t.

So I decide to go down myself to check and I hear the mysterious and eerie sonar-like sound too, but cannot pin-point exactly the source, direction or location. At times it appears as thoguh it is coming from a distance. Should I go outside? I decide not to. Then we check every electrical gadget and charging stations around the house, and every nook and corner of the kitchen, dining and living room. No news. Various scary scenarios race through my mind. We think it could be the smoke or CO alarm, but no, it is not. Aliens? I have no idea.

Now, we think that this is not something that we can sleep over with anyway. We have to solve the mystery before we get a good night’s rest.

So my wife goes down to the basement to check, and reports that she can't locate any ping sound there either. We check out the coat cupboard in the passage leading to the guest washroom. The answer is negative. No sound.

Then we check the guest washroom too. No luck. On the left in the passageway area there’s my famous set of shelves with my hobby items along with my toolbox.

Cupping my right ear to home in to localize the mind boggling sound, I stoop down closing in towards the toolbox and ah-ha! The ping gets slightly louder. It appears to come from the tool box which I quickly open and then the sound gets even louder and voila! And there we have it. The strange sound from the culprit is heard loud and clear. As it turns out, it is from a Stud-Finder which had a small screwdriver snugly lodged against the activator button of the stud finder waiting to be separated from each other that caused the ping.

In fact I had used the stud finder that very morning to hang some photo frames on the wall. It has now been assigned a new place (solitary confinement) in order to avoid such mind-boggling scary incidents in the future.