As I was perched on the roof of my car Sunday, I had a thought, but it probably wasn’t the one you would guess. I was thinking that I am lucky that I have friends that know things that I don’t. Okay, yes, I was also thinking how lucky I am that no one was around with a video camera in case things went south, but mostly about the friend thing.
A severe storm blew through our area yesterday, and while we were lucky to not to get a ton of damage in our neighborhood, I had one random thing happen after the storm that I couldn’t explain. I couldn’t open my garage door. Diana and I discovered this when I wanted to run a quick errand after the storm. She hit the button, and nothing happened. Then, she noticed that the light that is usually on the switch was out too.
Thinking I was pretty smart, I told her I would show her a fun trick and took her to see the fuse box. However, upon opening it, none of the fuses were tripped. I reset the one for the garage, just in case, and went in search of the GCFI outlet that I somewhat vaguely remembered the inspector telling me about when I bought the house. I reset the only two that I found (even though they weren’t tripped either) and went back to the garage ready to rock and roll.
No luck.
So, I manually released the garage door from the electric opener, and we went on our errand. Diana was impressed with how strong she thinks I must be to do that, and I didn’t correct her.
When we got home, I texted my Sanity Committee, two guy friends from work that not only give me sanity checks at work, but also, are very handy around their own houses. One of them gave me the suggestion that I should test the outlet to see if it was working, before we went too far down the road of additional troubleshooting.
One problem: the outlet is in the ceiling. The 12’ ceiling.
I am tall, but even I can’t reach that high – and I only had a stepstool that didn’t get me quite high enough to test it. JJ made a comment that he had climbed on the roof of his vehicle before to do a similar test, and while it wasn’t a direct suggestion, I decided that I would do that to verify if the outlet was working or not.
So, I grabbed a nightlight as my test object to plug into the outlet, and asked Diana to come spot me. Basically, I wanted her on standby to call 911. (Side note: you know it might not be your wisest choice when your 7-year-old questions the safety of your choices, but I persevered.). I climbed on the roof of my car, and slowly stretched up to the outlet to test it.
Nothing.
Before I climbed down, I wanted to verify that it was the outlet instead of the nightlight. I asked Diana to run in the house and quickly grab something else I could plug into to test the outlet.
My daughter doesn’t do anything quickly – so, I had some time on my hands to contemplate my situation and my choices.
This is when I had the thought that I am lucky that I have friends that are smart. It never would have occurred to me to test the outlet (and certainly not to climb on the top of my car), but I am glad that I had a friend that knew more than me and shared his experience. While I was up there waiting, I also got a text message from a friend asking if I would read something over for her before she submitted it for work. I responded that I would be happy to do it, and she thanked me saying that she “appreciated me sharing my expertise with her.” If only she had known that I was replying from the roof of my car!
God love her, Diana ran to her bedroom and came back with the lamp off her nightstand, proudly proclaiming, “I know this works, I just tested it inside and the light came on. I even left the switch on when I unplugged it so it would come on right away for you.” (Smart girl!)
Again, no luck, so now we officially knew that the outlet wasn’t working. As I was crawling back off the car, Diana tried the lamp in a couple more of the outlets in the garage and those didn’t work either. I texted the results to the Sanity Committee, and they suggested that I had another GCFI outlet somewhere that I hadn’t found yet.
They were right (as always!), and once I found it and reset it, we were back in business.
It ended up making me feel really grateful. Yes, it was inconvenient to deal with, but nowhere near what others were dealing with from storm damage. More than that, I am grateful to be part of a group of friends that can reach out to ask for help and that it is gladly given.
But next time, I will think those thoughts on the ground, not the roof of my car.
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