My luggage rack broke my house. And I'm so poor I can't even go on a trip to use that stupid luggage rack.

Before I begin my rambling, I put this on the Pie on the Face page but I know some of you aren't on Facebook (Sadie and PJ, I'm looking at you).  The next Atlanta Pie party will be at my house on October 26th at 2:00 p.m.  I hope a ton of you can make it!  If you are out of town and want to come but need a place to lay your sweet head down at night, leave a comment and we'll try to find a place for you.

Okay, since several of you asked if the deactivator thingie at Home Depot made my purse stop setting off alarms, I think it did.  Yay!  When I left Home Depot that night it did not go off.  But I haven't been in another store since then so I will let you know.  I think I'm going to the grocery store after work because I know how to party on Friday night, but I don't think they have security things on the door.  So I might not know for sure until I get paid again next week and actually have a reason go into a store.

And Heather, YES!  I do have a metal tape measure in my purse.  Apparently I think I need to be the Boy Scout leader of Atlanta and I always want to Be Prepared.   But I've carried it in different purses for years and this just started happening a couple of weeks ago so I don't know if my tape measure is setting them off.

Remember a couple of days ago when I was screaming from the mountain tops or, you know, from my cubicle, that my house had not broken in eleven days and how awesome my world was.

Yeah.

Wednesday night I got home from work and hit my remote for my lovely detached garage.  Nothing happened.  I hit it again.  Nothing happened.  So I got out of my car and I could hear the motor making motor-y sorts of sounds but the door was not opening. 

I went in the normal door that leads into the storage area of the garage and I was able to manually open the big garage door with my brute strength even though my left arm is a bit weak seeing as how I've broken it twice and have spent a total of 14 months in casts and physical therapy in the past 18 months, and then I went inside and got fake son because he likes doing manly stuff.  He came out and climbed up on a ladder, looked at it and then saw a sticker that said something about electrocution and possible death and he ran for his life.  Seriously.  He said he didn't want to touch it.  I didn't want to either so I can't say that I blame him.  And he told me while he was up on the ladder reading the sticker that said he was going to burst into flames that he saw a lot of grease in a section of the track.

Yesterday I asked my co-workers for recommendations for my latest and greatest broken house problem and three people gave me names.  I Googled them all and one of them charged by 15 minute increments for however long they have to work on your problem.  No thank you.  I looked at another one and many reviewers said the owner tries to rip off poor clueless women type folks who don't know crap about garage doors (were they talking about me?  I think so) and that they were extremely rude.  No thank you.  The third company had really good reviews so I called them and they said they could come out this morning.  Ding ding ding!  We have a winner.

So I took a half day off work yet again to wait for a service person to come to my house.

The guy got to my house and I took him back to the garage and we walked in there and he bumped something and told me to hit the remote and the door opened right up.  And right then I knew, I was about to feel like a total idiot.

"HOLY CRAP!  WHAT DID YOU JUST HIT?"  I screamed.  "I'M SUCH A MORON."  He laughed and said, "let me look at something and then I'll tell you.  And I'm not going to charge you for that by the way."  And I liked him right that second.  Plus he told me his name was Brandon and his shirt said his name was Brandon, but he had to call a guy to get a quote on something optional I want to have done to my house if things stop breaking and I can save the money for it, and I learned his nickname that his friends know him by is Roscoe.  How can you not like a bald guy named Roscoe who isn't going to charge you for being an idiot?

Do y'all know what was wrong with my garage?  Apparently the emergency lock cord that hangs in the middle of the garage completely inconveniently and in a very stupid place, had somehow hooked onto the luggage rack on top of my SUV and had locked my door when I pulled out Wednesday morning to go to work.




And now I had taken a half day off work and paid someone to come unlock my garage.  Because I'm a moron. (And I can't figure out why there is a huge space before this paragraph.  It won't go away.)

I also made a special point of showing him that there was a lot of grease on the track.  Do you know what he said?  I'm going to tell you right now.  He said, "ma'am, um, there's supposed to be grease on the track.  That's how the opener moves on the track."  And right then I knew, I was definitely an idiot.  In fact, he ended up adding a lot more grease to it because it didn't have enough. 

But then he looked and showed me where a cable was about to completely come off of a pulley so if I hadn't accidentally locked my garage with my luggage rack, my whole garage door could have fallen off.  I think that's probably bad when your entire garage door falls off.  So I paid him for a maintenance service call and he tightened the cable so my entire garage door won't fall off and he tightened all of the bolts on the door and adjusted some springs that needed adjusting and he even changed my light bulbs for me.  I also had a keypad entry thing on the outside of the garage but the part that was supposed to cover the battery was missing so the entire battery was bulging and acid had leaked out of it and it was permanently stuck in the unit, plus when you buy a foreclosed house the previous owner is apparently too pissed to make a list and include codes for stuff for whoever buys the house they've lost, so I didn't have a clue what the code was.  Brandon/Roscoe replaced it for me too so if I'm a moron again in the future and lose my remote or something, I can still get the door open even if I break an arm for a third time and can't manually lift it.

So please take this advice:  If your automatic garage door opener stops working, make sure you haven't locked the door with the top of your car so you won't feel like an idiot.