Memory

It was a hot day towards the end of school last year when our old garage door opener burnt out. We could tell it was coming as the sound the door made as it came up could only be described as shrieking. My dad went to the handy dandy Lowes store and came back with a spiffy, “Super Silent” edition. However, as he began to install it he came to the ugly realization that the track the door itself slid up was a different length on the new model that then old one. I had to help him move the entire assembly that holds the opener from the roof about three and a half feet forward. I then when inside for a couple of hours and could periodically hear curses of varying degrees of nastiness through the garage door.
After the last curses rang out, my dad dragged me outside to show me his handy work. He clicked the remote, and the door slid up, clicked again, down it went. Trouble started though when he tried to use a remote to open the other two garage doors. Somewhere along the line, he had cut the blue wire instead of the red on or something of that mysterious electronic sort. My dad, being the absolutely amazing electronic wizard that he is, stared at the problem for a good two minutes before looking to me and saying, “You fix it,” and storming of into the house. The buck now effectively passed, I tried to figure out where to start. My first sweep was purely investigative. I managed to find six wires hanging loosely where the old opener used to hang. On the back of on of the old garage door opener, I also found a box marked signal box. After jerry rigging this box onto the back of one of the garage door openers still in operation, and fiddling with those six mysterious wires, I finally discovered a combination that made the doors go up. Unfortunately, they were backwards. The left button opened the right door and the right button the left door.
The next logical step was to simply reverse the wires. However, for some reason I can’t even began to fathom, the powers that be decided that the simple reversal of the wires would fix anything. After about half and hour of frustrated fiddling, I finally figured out the pattern for the wires and got the doors working.
After successfully fixing the garage doors and making them go up and down for several minutes. I triumphantly paraded around my house singing the melody to Queen’s “We are the Champions.” As my family calls it, “The day the garage doors die,” will always be engrained in my memories.