Somewhere In The Wreckage

Okay, it’s Saturday and we’re going to actually fix the garage door. And by ‘we’ I mean one of my buddies is going to actually do it while I stand near and look interested and helpful. And by ‘garage door’ I mean that boxy thingy that hangs up near the ceiling and pulls on that chain thingy and opens and closes the door.

Which actually is working just fine. The problem is we’ve misplaced the actual garage door opener. And by ‘misplaced’ I mean that somewhere in the wreckage of this household there lies hidden the garage door opener, one or two undiscovered Easter Eggs and the original plans for the Death Star.

The issue with this particular garage door mechanism is that it’s Ancient. Though it still works, it seems to operate at a radio frequency now disallowed by the Government Office Governing Garage Door Radio Frequencies because, it would seem, that should we activate it, satellites would drop from the sky.

Whatever.

As it is, I’m not going to clean the garage until I’m sure I can open it from the outside.

(32 Hours Later)

Okay, it’s Sunday and I actually fixed the garage door. It was hell and I am not making this up.

There must be some theorem or primary law of thermodynamics saying something about a problem devolving into chaos the more attention and energy it is given because such was the case with the God-forsaken [very unpublishable word here] garage door opener. I basically rebuilt the entire mechanism along the way.

I cursed out my own father several times, solely because he was not nearby to take one look at the mess and say, ‘oh. yeah. you need this-thus-and-so-boom-you’re-done’, while at the same time grabbing the correct tool from that ancient olive green canvas tool bag he’s had since God was a boy. He’s like that (my dad, that is). He can tear down and rebuild anything. I’ve seen him do it. He can take a Q-tip and a can opener and build you a Pratt & Whitney jet engine. Yet, while I stood there anxiously waiting for that part of my DNA to kick in, the garage door hung askew mocking me all the while. Mock, mock, mock.

The garage door opener engine was a hissy fit of wires which I had to figure out. I could rewire the Space Shuttle after that. And, okay, I know there were only six wires involved but we’re talking about me, and in Toddland that equals the entire electrical grid west of the Rockies.

The gear head around which the chain moves, according to the manual, is described deceivingly as a ‘chained spreader.’ It does not, I might mention here, spread the chain enough to make a damn bit of difference. but I won’t go into that because there are all other kinds of things to go into. Like how the cable wiring that maintains the proper tension of the chain drive, and the weight of the garage door. Or the Golden Gate bridge.

I am, also, convinced that somewhere within a three foot radius of my work area (and by ‘work area’ I mean the area in which I could throw anything that made me mad during this freak show), there is a rip in the Space/Time continuum that causes cable wiring and garage door chain links to mysteriously multiply and then shrink for no reason.

There were so many stupid little detours to this pain in the rear end, it’s not even humorous.

The door opens perfectly.

The door closes perfectly.

That’s all that matters.

Well…okay, so it doesn’t close perfectly.

I don’t want to talk about it.

I’m still trying to figure out how to make all of this someone else’s fault.