Fix the F***ing Garage Door

I'd just like to take a moment to implore the people who maintain my building to find some way to keep the garage door opening and closing in a normal fashion, because whenever it breaks (which is often) it always seems to start a cascade of irritating events. For example, it only breaks down when I have hot food in the car, and often at times when cars start to pile up, and I have to wait five minutes with my reverse lights on for the genius behind me to do the math and figure out he needs to move his truck (it's only the SUV drivers who sit grinding their teeth apparently waiting for me to rev up the engine and drive my sedan through the door, the guy in a saab just waves and backs up). And backing up that incline blind over the sidewalk and back onto the street isn't a lot of fun either. My first opener worked for like a week before I had to replace it, by the way, and we're on our third design in four years (all three had about the same failure rate).

I'm obviously not the only one to have problems with the door, since about a week after people moved in to this building there was a giant dent in the door right where my right front bumper lines up, basically the exact point you'd hit if you shifted into reverse trying to back out, didn't get the clutch in fast enough, and rolled into the door. Or you were just an idiot and took your foot off the brake while looking for your garage door opener with your phone tucked against your shoulder.) I thought the worst was the time I came home at 1am and the door opener was broken so I just parked my car outside in guest parking, and the next morning at my association towed it to the street to resurface the drive. When I finally remembered my car, a meter maid, one of those damsels of damages, those ladies of levies, had left me a ticket, and she was a femme fatale of fines to swoop in right before I got there and write not one, but two tickets, leaving only one, so I could find out about the other one when I got angry letters from the county and phone calls from collection agents, and take a scenic trip to the courthouse to deal with it. Granted, a trip to the courthouse for me is less distance than Bruce Willis had to drag Mos Def in that awful, awful movie last year, but that was a truly irritating conclusion to the damn garage door not opening weeks earlier.

Today I may have it beat. As I came home with hot food, the door wouldn't open, so I got out to go in a side door, open the garage door manually, and try to dash into my car, start the engine, and drive under the door before it slammed down on my hood. It was a good plan, I think, but the side door wouldn't open either. So I parked in guest parking (after casting a wary glance for notices about towing) and tried to go in the front door... which of course wouldn't open either. So I went to the management office, and seeing that the front door to their building was propped open with a vice grip jammed under it, I had a bad feeling, which was confirmed by the staff: the whole system that controls all the doors was broken. So I sat outside in the sunshine and brightened up thinking it's at least a nice enough day to sit out here and eat my food, and I laughed off the recurring saga of our magic doors that would confound even Ali Baba's “Open, sez me.”

While that isn't so bad, a couple hours later I was sitting on my balcony, engrossed in a book, when it began to rain, but due to the overhang, I just enjoyed the quiet patter of rain next to me and the absorbing stillness that comes with heavy midwestern rain, and the invariable dazzle of lightning on the horizon. Then I just about jumped out of my goddamn chair when I was reminded that I live downtown, and lightning regularly hits within blocks, sending a sudden shock of superheated air echoing off the buildings with a crack in the same instant as a purple electric flash washes over the neighborhood in some sort of aggressive homage to Zeus and Jimi Hendrix. And still, the storms out here in the vast, lonely plains really are beautiful, like the one raging over the Twins-Black Sox game earlier this year. (Although my family's scottish terrier who stood chin-up to german shepherds ten times his size used to disappear under my bed in a spinning black flash and shivered in terror with his paws over his ears during big storms, so he might have offered an alternate opinion. Or at least a baleful roll of his eyes.)

Still not too bad, and you may notice I seem to have completely forgotten the topic of my finicky garage door... and so had I, forgetting about my car entirely. Then the tornado sirens went off, and I found the storm's charm abated rapidly. I went inside and turned on the TV, which was having some of the most interesting storm coverage I've seen in a while, like a meteorologist nervously adjusting his necktie and saying “Boy, there are some colors on that map we don't usually see!” Usually it goes from blue for rain, to green for heavy rain, to yellow, orange, and red as the wind and rain pick up and more things are lifted off the ground, but apparently there's purple, and then when they exhaust the rainbow they go to black and white patches to indicate which areas of the city are beyond rain and into golf-ball sized hail. There was also this spinning circle to indicate the deep knot of low pressure where the sky was spinning as it dipped it's way to earth, to let those people know to put their heads between their legs and kiss their asses goodbye. Oh, and a line to indicate the likely path of the tornado already on the ground ripping it's way across the southwest suburbs. In the studio they were collecting quarter sized hail from the ground outside and showing how big it was relative to a motorola razr (seriously, they couldn't use change or something everybody has handy?) and making helpful comments like “Yes, this will indeed fuck up your car.” I'm paraphrasing that last part, but it did make me suddenly remember my car... which I left outside because of the perennially malfunctioning garage door.

The tornado sirens had shut off temporarily so I ran out to move it (please nobody mention to my mother that I went outside in between tornado sirens) and waited for any brief appearance of a gap in the the increasingly large chunks of ice clattering on the steps outside. As the ice clattered off the top of my head (and the roof of my car) and buckets of water sloshed all the way through my clothes ten steps out the door, sheeting off the roof and into the car as I got in, all I could think was, “Motherf***ing garage door!” And as I peered through the sheets of water on my windshield pulling out onto the street, nearly getting clipped by some idiot in an SUV careening by as she raced home, I thought if the garage door was broken, I was just parking there in the driveway pausing only long enough to leave a note in the window for the management company reading “F*** you.”

Okay, that last bit proved unnecessary, and I try not to be hostile towards the staff over things that they keeping having to fix that really aren't their fault, like the previous garage door opener remote that they used to have to open up and fix with a screwdriver and a tweezers for me every couple of weeks. But the only garage door I've ever seen that was more of a constant source of aggravation than this one was at a place where I used to work, and that was because truck drivers (including one of the ones we employed) kept driving into the walls, taking out the supporting walls or ripping their doors off, or one time dropping a whole trailer without cranking the supports all the way down first (couldn't get that one out for weeks). Or there was my coworker who drove a box van into a mirror and ripped a hole in the roof, although that one was a rental and he got the hell out of their lot before they noticed (also he didn't shower, so they may have just told him to leave the keys on the floor and back away). More often they'd rip chunks off the roof header when they'd see the door open and just pull in, apparently figuring the signs listing the clearance as 13'4” and telling drivers to put their wheels back were just some sort of practical joke I'd concocted, like Ashton Kutcher was going to come running out, do some fake karate moves, and announce “Ha ha you moved your wheels and it's really 13'6”! You've been punked! It's two inches bigger... that's what she said!” Anyways, if you maintain an apartment building... just fix the f***ing garage door.