you just pull the red handle

yay! it's time for funny stories from the power outage.

so the big wind came through here pretty hard. there was a lot of damage in my neighborhood and the surrounding towns. our power went out sometime sunday night, so i had a limited amount of news when i woke up monday morning.

now, there's no point for me in hanging about the house when there's no heat or electricity, plus in my car i have heat, electricity and six gallons of water, along with most of my portable charging devices and some other emergency gear.

because that's the way i roll.

it was a change of plans, because i had originally allocated the day to staying home and doing laundry and dishes and maybe going out to get a haircut, but ok. i figured i could maybe just get a haircut and then go out and play ingress and my day wouldn't be very different than many of the previous months.

so i called my barber (yeah, he's a real barber and i get a buzz cut anyway) and i couldn't make an appointment because no power in the shop so i figured i'd just go out and play and that's when the trouble started.

now, storms are normal out here. so are power outages. the normal thing to do is for me to put my car in the garage overnight and because the garage door opener is electric, i go out in the morning with my keys to the handy little emergency release where you put the key in the little doohickey and turn it to pull out the lock which is connected to a cable which is connected to your emergency release handle.

only when i turned the key and pulled the cable, nothing happened this time. i remembered that i had had my electric garage door opener replaced recently, so i figured it was an installation problem.

no biggie, but no car and no power out here represents a hazardous situation.

so i called the garage door company and asked them to help. i am not going to name them because they have done good work for me and my family if we discount patricia, who answers the phones.

i explained my problem to patricia and she told me that if would be very simple for me to just go in the garage and pull the red handle and then i could open the door manually. i tried to further explain to patricia that i have no way of getting in the garage if the one door won't open. she just kept talking over me, telling me to just pull the red handle.

she suggested i use the remote. i told her it was in the car. i also asked her if she thought the remote would be effective since there was no electricity. she asked me if i couldn't just pull the red handle. i tried to tell her again that i have to be in the garage to pull the red handle, but she was talking over me. she asked me if i could use the keypad. i said that in fact the keypad seemed to have a battery that was still working but-

and this is where she interrupted me to say i should use that then.

and i asked her if the opener itself was likely to work without electricity.

you want to guess what she said next?

she told me to just pull the red handle.

i swear, i'm not making this up.

i let her keep explaining to me about that red handle for a while and when she was finished, i said "ok, patricia, what's your plan for getting me into the garage so i can pull the handle?"
"you just go in through the d- you DO HAVE another door, don't you?"
"i think you are beginning to understand the problem"

but no, she was not beginning to understand the problem.

she asked me if i had a window i could crawl through. she asked me if i was SURE there wasn't another door.

i sort of wanted to say "wow! apparently there is another DOOR on my garage that i have never noticed in the seventeen years i have lived here! oh, THANK you, particia! thank you SO much!" but i had a feeling that would sail right over her head.

what i said was that there was only one door and that as long as i was unable to open it, i was trapped.

she offered to open a service ticket.

"and what good will that do me?" i asked.

she said that when the power came on she could send a truck and someone could come the red handle for me.

i was explaining that the power might not come on for days and i really needed to be able to get my car out as a matter of safety and that it really needed to be done now, and not wait until the power comes back on and anyway, when the power comes back on, there will be no need for a service call

and that's when the conversation got really weird.

she kept saying (my name)? (name)? i can't hear you, (name). i kept saying i was still there, but since she never stopped talking, she would have been able to hear me.

and the line went dead.

so i called my mom (who has done a lot of business with this company) and SHE called and had a lot of the same conversation with patricia until my mom said it was bullshit (my mom's phrasing) and asked to talk to the manager.

so patricia put her through.

...to patricia's voicemail.

it is almost anticlimactic to tell you that eventually my mom talked to the general manager who agreed to send a truck because it was an emergency and patricia was a little put out that some people's appointments had to be moved back.

the general manager was having a hard day so he gets my sympathy but patricia is always like that.

and by "hard day", i mean that besides him and particia, only two people were able to make it in to work because of storm damage and one of those two people was now being redirected to my house, which is not near any of their other scheduled customers.

the gentleman who arrived in the company truck looked like hell when he arrived. he said that he lives in lincoln, which didn't really need any more explanation, because that town was HARD hit. it turned out that around 12:30 the previous night a tree fell and crushed his pickup truck and then he and his wife laid awake all night listening to half or their roof blow off.

but he had an undamaged car and managed to get out and get to work, because he was needed.

he was a little stumped as to how to get in to pull the red handle, but he had some knowledge and some tricks in his bag, and between his ingenuity and my doweling, tape, and coathanger wire, we got it open and it turned out that the installer had not correctly hooked up the red handle to this cable, making it impossible to pull with the door shut.

he hooked it up properly and went on his way.

i'd like to tell you that the day went smoothly after that, but i would be lying.