Here’s a big irritation I run into way more than I feel I should: something won’t be working, and I of course look to myself first as the reason it isn’t working. Did I do it wrong? Did I miss a step? Did I break it in the process? Am I a moron? I’ll spend hours or days or weeks trying to figure it out and fix what I must have messed up.
And then I’ll resolve that maybe I’m not in the wrong… and maybe the thing just wasn’t made correctly or is broken. I send it back or get it fixed and viola! It works! And those hours and days and weeks of stress and labor were in vain.
I bring this up because Scott and I were setting up the garage door opener and every thing was working great–except for the sensors, which actually play a pretty large role in the operation of a garage door. It won’t go down if they aren’t working properly unless you hold the mounted down button the whole time.
We couldn’t get the sensors to sense each other. One sends an infrared signal to the other; when the signal is interrupted, the door stops going down. Since the signal was perpetually broken in our setup, the door wouldn’t go down.
Naturally, we thought we were doing something wrong–weren’t lining them up properly or something. So, we played with them for hours. We checked all the wires to see if we had caused a short somehow. We read and re-read the installation instructions. And then we conceeded defeat.
Scott called the company a couple days later and received new sensors yesterday. He installed them and it of course now works. He e-mailed: “It’s so easy to line the sensors up when they are working.”
No kidding.
This happened with a computer motherboard of mine and a couple other situations. It’s actually still a lingering problem with some new hard drives I bought for my computer.
Just really irritating.
