Lynn Michelle Blog

I’d like to file the following post in the “It can only happen to me category”. Thank you.

At 11:30am yesterday I was cleaning the house and I was near the front door. I have a front facing garage so I heard/saw it open. Thinking my husband had come home for lunch I eagerly looked out the front door and waited. No husband. Hmm. I called him, he’s at work! So I closed the garage door and went on with life. Holy crap, it was open again with 10 minutes! Interesting. Thinking this was some sort of “sharing a frequency with neighbor” problem I started walking around the neighborhood. No one was out. No garages were open … and mine … started closing. So glad that Vivian had thought ahead and opened the front door!

I pulled the string to disconnect the garage door and I called a garage door company to come out to take a look. I had already found all of the garage door openers and removed the batteries thinking they might be shorting or a button was stuck. Nope. Still open & close. Open & close. I’ve convinced myself I’m not on Candid Camera and no one is screwing with me.

Then a new realization – if you pull the string and the garage door tries to open it rehooks itself and the garage door opens again. Ok, we disconnected the power. FINE. FINE.

Around 1 in the afternoon, Vivian and I were hungry so I went to grab some shoes and my burglar alarm starts to arm itself in “away” mode. What “away” does is that it gives you about a minute of warning beeps and then it goes into a frenzy of beeps and arms the system. I’m thinking Vivian is trying to get me out of the house faster and is being needlessly feisty so I yell at her and disarm the system. Well, she’s nowhere any of the keypads and is innocently sitting in my office staring at me.

The garage door guy comes around 2 in the afternoon and suggests that the circuit board is fried on the opener. The difference between replacing the board and getting a new garage door opener was minimal so we decided to go ahead and get a brand new opener. The guy leaves and my husband comes home a few hours later and all is well.

Around 7pm in the evening the security system tries to arm itself again … and my garage door starts to OPEN!!! We disconnect the garage door after it’s opened & closed a few times – you know, the couple of times it takes you to make sure this is actually happening?

Well it’s almost bed time at this point so we just arm the system for the night but here’s the kicker. It starts disarming itself and then ARMING itself. So like every 30 minutes it’s a beep and then the whole “away” beep thing. I’m about to go ape sh!t, I need sleep! I call the alarm company twice before going to bed and they promise a call back. They call back at 11:30pm when I’m dead asleep, however, they have sent me to the wrong department. This guy works on fire alarms not burgler alarms, can’t make many suggestions other than I should just “ride it out and call them in the morning”. Are you kidding me, I want to make him listen to this beeping mess and tell him to just “ride it out”. BAH!

I hole myself up in the bedroom and shove towels under the door and pray that Gizmo (the cat) wants to sleep through the night and not start Pawing at the Door Fest 2009.

Morning finally comes. The alarm has decided to shut the heck up around 1am and my husband leaves for work. I scope out the garage from the front door and discover it’s opening by itself again. YAY. Unplug, call the security company again and tell them my story – complete with new garage door opener. I’m feeling pretty witty now, since I’ve been up since 5:20 am (at least it was a refreshing run).

The security system company has taken initial responsibility and is coming out to take a look. On the plus side, I have this hilarious story to tell and my garage door now opens quietly and not like a dying antelope.

Funniest part – to me, anyway – when I first called yesterday afternoon the guy who told me it was probably a fluke was the guy who is now telling me that he needs to come out and take a look at the security system. He says to me :”Ma’am, this is great news, it means you aren’t crazy!” Woo hoo. Put that in my file, thanks.