💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~oldernow › 2023-10-31-07-05-39.gmi captured on 2023-11-04 at 11:50:44. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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Garage door apocalypse

Last night my wife woke me about three hours into sleep for hearing our garage door opener - located directly below our bedroom - operating.

I tip-toed around naked (well.. wearing socks due to how cold its been of late - combined with the odds of feet escaping the thermal safety of covers), peeking out windows, listening carefully. We'd left the car in the driveway because we've a couple trailers temporarily in the driveway blocking car access to the garage, so maybe someone got in the car and engaged the garage door opener remote in the vehicle? But I didn't see any vehicle doors open, so odds of that were dropping. There *is* keypad outside the garage door connected to the device by wire, so that was a possibility.

My wife decided to call the police, which felt hasty to me, but I wasn't going to win that argument because, well.. I never win *any* arguments.. <coughs playfully>.

I eventually saw three squad cars driving slowly down the street with their headlights out, and then eventually flashlights coming on. So I clothed again, and waited for word from my wife, as she was still on the phone with the dispatcher. She soon enough told me the three officers that arrived had search the open garage and yard to their satisfaction, and wanted to be let in to discuss the situation.

I let them in, they asked a bunch of questions, then took a look at the basement for completeness' sake. (They pointed out an improvement that could be made to sliding latches on the small, outdoor hatch door to the basement, so I'll work on that today.)

But then I remembered that after we closed the garage door for the evening, I found it odd that the button on the wired controller *in* the garage that can turn off the light on the opener (which in my mind stays on much longer than it needs to after the door closes... grrrrr...) no longer did anything. I even mentioned that fact to my wife, but neither of us could imagine compelling causation in whatever that was indicating, so we got into our evening and forgot about it.

(FWIW, we watched the 2011 movie "The Change-Up", which neither of us had ever seen, and we rather enjoyed it.)

So I mentioned to one of the cops that *maybe* there was some malfunction in that wired controller, although of course describing to him something about its light switch wonkiness didn't have any light bulbs going off over his head with respect to the door opening mechanism activating. If anything, his reaction was in the direction of a "WTF are you yammering about?" facial response. :-)

BUT*, after they left, I pushed the door opener button to close the door, and at first it did nothing. But then it worked when I pressed on a different area of its surface (its surface is about 1.5" square). I tried it several times, and it felt useless in some places, but hair-triggered in other. And as I stared at it, I came under the impression it's somewhat tilted in its housing, as though somewhat "stuck down" on one side, thus more "stuck up" on the opposite side.

So I'm thinking that button somehow got "kittywampis" (sp?) in a way that it could possibly self activate....