Garage matters

For some reason this upper respiratory thing that attacked me last week has hung on like a baby gorilla and I’ve not dragged myself out of the house for several days (except to take walks, which is my substitute for going to the gym).

So it was a big deal that I got in my car to go to Whole Foods yesterday morning—the car’s not been out of the garage since Saturday.

But I also opened my second garage (yes, there are two that come with this flat—for which I’m paying a huge amount of rent; I use the second to store stuff like my good china, the bookcases I’m trying to get rid of and all the broken-down packing cartons for my next move, since the garage is so situated that you can’t actually get a car in or out of it) to find some old journals. And when I was pulling out of my car garage I realized the storage garage door hadn’t closed. It kept getting down about ¾ of the way and then just went back up.

I couldn’t get it to close. Which meant I couldn’t leave the place until it could somehow be made to close. Which meant I had to call the property management company, and the rep had to check this and that before she called a garage door company.

(The last time I actually opened this garage was December 2011, when I loaded up my mid-sized rental car to take 13 cartons of books to the used bookshop. There were cobwebs and stuff all over the thing. This complex was built in 1993; I’m sure everything in that door mechanism was original to that date.)

The short version of this story is that my day was pretty well shot, waiting for the repair guy.

But the good part is the repair guy, Bill. He must be 70, I swear, but still out fixing people’s garage door openers. He had to put this cable back on a reel—but then he went through tightening bolts, hammering the rails and spraying some industrial-strength type of WD40 on anything that moved. He even replaced the rollers, and you could hear the difference when the door slid open and shut.

Here’s the thing—Bill wasn’t interested in just doing a quick fix, he wanted to make sure the damned thing was well and truly fixed, that it wouldn’t give anyone any trouble anytime soon.

I’d forgot there were people who took such pride in their work that they go to that length.

So—not such a bad day after all.