In college we figured out a way to automatically turn down the stereo in the dorm room below us as if by remote control.

Every room had a heating/cooling unit built into the exterior wall under the window. These units were fed with water that was circulated by pipes that ran along the ceiling of the room below the unit and up into each unit in the floor above.

One time after a little too much southern rock coming up from the floor below, I had an idea. I popped the front off of our heating/cooling unit and noticed a small gap in the floor where the pipes came into our unit from the room below. I found a small length of pipe and positioned it into the gap, and poured a glass of water into it.

Almost immediately the music stopped, some curses where uttered, and we could hear a lot of scrambling going on below. We replaced the front of our unit and went back to whatever we were up to. Some time later, a maintenance worker came up to our room, knocked and said he had to check out our heater. He opened the unit up, looked at it, detected no leaks and asked us if anything weird had happened with it lately. “Nope, everything seems normal,” we replied, and he left.

From that point forward, whenever the music got too annoying, we simply got a glass of water and turned the stereo off. Makes me wonder why the guy below didn’t move his equipment out of the line of fire.