Technology, Innovation & Telecomm

I believe I’m well on the way to proving the existence of a genetic pre-disposition toward the ravaging of garage doors. I have two subjects to use for case studies: Myself and my father.

In an earlier post, I mentioned that it had been my experience that garage doors yield readily to vehicles that attempt to pass through them. When my first encounter down that line failed to convince me of this, a few subsequent incidents brought me solidly into the fold.

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If memory serves me, in the 70’s, Ford had a few “design issues” with the transmissions of some of its vehicles where on occasion they could slip from “park” into “reverse”. This was seemingly a bad thing if the car was running. Go figure. I also seem to recall seeing stickers on the sun visors of said vehicles indicating that they really felt you needed to have the parking brake on in just such circumstances. Got all that? You’ll want to keep it all in mind as I continue…

My uncle, my father, and I were working inside the detached garage behind our house. It was cold out and my dad needed to run the engine of the Ford while he worked. So, we did what you do in such cases: We put a piece of flexible tubing onto the tail pipe of the car and ran it under the garage door so that we could keep it mostly closed. While my dad tinkered under the hood, my uncle and I were working on the inside of the vehicle, cleaning it out and doing some other mostly cosmetic stuff.

Whatever the work was that my dad was doing at the time seemed to require that he rev the engine a bit here and again. He was able to do this from under the hood by means of tugging the accelerator cable by the carberator, and he had done this a few times already. However, one of the times that he did this, the aforementioned “design issue” manifested itself with the result that the car started moving backward toward the closed garage door. My uncle and I were leaning into the vehicle from both the driver and passenger side when it started its attempted escape. You’d think that we would have hopped out of the way, wouldn’t you? Not a chance. Instead, for some strange reason we both grabbed the car and dug our feet in as though we could stop it. It wasn’t moving fast but I can tell you that our combined strength wasn’t near enough to halt its progress. So, the car quietly dragged us both along as it backed into and through the garage door. The only one who had any sense was my dad. As we were being drug along, he walked to the driver’s side and threw it back into park (or turned off the ignition, I can’t remember which), halting the vehicle. Sadly, by that time most of the rear of the car was outside the garage. Anyhow, you can imagine what followed: yet another repair of a garage door and its associated hardware for my poor dad. The upside in this case (sorta) was that this time the door being crunched was on my dad’s side of the garage instead of being on my mother’s, as it had been when I had my “Mustang-through-door” incident. I guess the optimist would say that everything was in balance as a result…

But was that all? Noooooooo….

Welcome to the third in a series of tales of woe from the family garage.

So far, I’ve given you a flavor of the range of damage that my father and I inflicted on our hapless garage doors when I was a kid. The fun doesn’t stop there. No boy! We have even more stories of the strange and unlikely carnage visited upon those faithful barriers.

My dad enjoyed running cars pretty hard. He had a good time with all the stuff teenagers love to do with them: doing doughnuts in snowy parking lots, burning rubber, driving fast, and skidding to a halt…long after he had been an adult. No sweat though, ’cause we loved it.

Anyhow, the driveway leading to the garage ran up the right side of the house and it was gravel. The garage itself was situated such that part of it was actually behind the house, while the section that housed my mom’s car was directly in-line with the driveway. As a result, when you wanted to pull a car into my dad’s side of the building (where we did body work, light mechanical stuff, and collision re-builds), you had to make a slight left turn, followed quickly thereafter by a slight right. No big deal.

One of the things that my dad loved to do was to pull into the driveway at a fairly fast clip and then stand on the brakes as he performed the little “left-followed-by-quick-right” maneuver. The effect was to skid in the gravel right up to the door. Truth told, I think it was a personal challenge to him to see just how close he could get, but that’s just my opinion.

He was performing this little stunt one day, when the car he was driving decided on its own that its braking performance was not going to be all it should. Mind you, the brakes didn’t fail completely or anything like that. They simply “faded” rather than “grabbed”. There was a slight gravel skid with the associated left and right…followed by the nose of the car punching yet another hole through the garage door. The car stopped alright. It just wasn’t where my dad expected it would be. Score another repair for my father. …And some points for the pessimists of the world, since now the universe was once again out of balance.

Score:

1. Mom’s door: 1
2. Dad’s door: 2

(I suspect that nowadays, someone might think that the poor garage was some kind of terrorist training grounds, what with the use of various vehicles for dealing that kind of destruction)

Take heart though. Balance was later restored…

I’ll be in Kansas City most of this week. I’ll be travelling with a co-worker to a customer out there to begin field-testing a package I’ve developed to allow them to do bulk firmware downloads to the many test heads they’ve purchased from the company I work for.

It was my first significant experience developing a scripting language. I built an interpreter that has a number of purpose-built features and a variety of general-purpose features. It was a blast, since I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time. It isn’t the prettiest language, but it fits the bill and helped me to learn a ton about language internals and some of the issues surrounding the things that separate various programming languages.

Meanwhile, let’s hope the tool helps the customer accomplish what they need to…!