Technology, Innovation & Telecomm

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…

1. 
   Diana Wade said...
   12:24 pm - August 4th, 2005

   You gotta admit, our family is a bit different than most.

   Funny, funny, funny! The fridge story as well as the garage door ones!
   Mom

2. 
   Diana Wade said...
   12:25 pm - August 4th, 2005

   Maybe that’s one reason kids loved to come over to our place-you never knew what was gonna happen!

   Remember the purple people eater truck? The one Paul Kreher ended up underneath?

3. 
   Administrator said...
   1:30 pm - August 4th, 2005

   I was thinking about the people eater while I wrote the first story about the Mustang. That’ll probably end up here sometime soon.

   It seems that there’s an endless list of really good stuff to commit to writing. …Makes me wonder about our family…