It is like a troop of tone-deaf gnomes are doing bad karaoke in my furnace

When I lived at Smith, our house (Gardiner!) was heated by an old steam system pretty common to older building.  Under the house, in a maze of basements that connected our house to 2 other houses in the Quad, was a huge boiler room.  One year I lived in the first-floor study (sigh... it was my own little library with built-in bookshelves), and when they turned the heaters on, you could hear the clanking of the pipes traveling all the way down the long hallway.  

Naturally, I imagined that there were little men who lived and worked inside the venting system, and those freaky noises were the men hammering and chiseling away on the metal pipes, so that the whole house would be heated.  

Well, here I am in New York City, and my little men are back inside my furnace.  Except instead of clanging, they are all drunk, and singing miserably.  And no one knows the words, so they all just hum.  Loudly.  Except for pauses to get a new pint of beer or something.   And then back to it.  Truly, I'm not sure how much more of this I can take.