Talk of the Town - Getting back to abnormal October 17 2001

That’s what they say, anyway. So I decided to stop obsessing about the Taliban and have my garage door fixed. What could be more normal than that? Plus I get credit for a patriotic gesture — sorta like hoisting the red, white and blue.

Except in this case, I’m just in the red.

This sorry tale began when an errant nighttime visitor dented one of my garage doors with a car bumper. The resulting gash, reacting to a salubrious Georgia climate of heat, cold, damp, ice, hail, humidity and the occasional biblical plague of frogs, had since festered into deepening dry rot. So I called the experts, who gave me options. I hate options.

At the Home Store, they said I could replace just one horizontal panel of the door. Or, in the interests of peace and security, I could buy a whole new pair of garage doors.

But what type? There’s the plain wood portal, the weather-resistant vinyl entry, and the double-coated, lead-lined super-protective garage door favored by Superman when he’s holed up in the Fortress of Solitude. It’s quite pricey. (This, of course, was no problem for the Man of Steel, who could crush a lump of carbon into a briquette-sized diamond. Sell one of those, and you can buy all the heavy-duty garage doors you want.)

The cost for a pair of fancy-dan doors was $800. But in entering this particular ring of home hell, one discovers that everything is a la carte.

“So it’ll cost $800 to have two new garage doors installed?” I asked.

“Oh,” came the reply. “You want them installed.”

Whereupon the Home Store guy whips out a calculator. Across seven years of homeownership, beyond dozens of encounters with contractors ranging from Honest John to Wile E. Coyote to cheerful Southern-fried rogues recalling Mr. Haney on “Green Acres,” I have never benefited from a calculator in the midst of negotiations. That’s because a calculator tells you that the amounts in question are so complex, so vast, that mere rudimentary add-it-up-in-your-head mathematics will not suffice. You will be taking a bath, rubber ducky not included.

Turns out that installing garage doors costs almost as much as the doors themselves. So we were back to square — or, in this case, panel — one.

Meantime, the pressure was on. After a stint of rainy weather, my wounded garage door developed gangrene. It was only a matter of time before the Subdivision Architectural Committee, suburbia’s answer to the Spanish Inquisition, issued me a subpoena. Because let’s not kid ourselves — your house has a face, and the garage doors are the smile. My house looked like a jack-o-lantern or a British professor. They have equally bad teeth.

So I made telephone inquiries about having a single panel replaced. True to local form, three out of the five door companies I left messages with never called back. America is filled with firms that do nothing but ignore my calls.

One company that did talk was willing to come out the next day. They took measurements over the phone and said they’d be there in the morning, “sometime between 8 and 10.” This was thrilling. Because contractors are to appointments what most men are to proposing marriage. It’s something they’ll get around to, but there’s no confounded hurry about it.

Next day, long about 10 a.m., the guy shows up. This was a good sign. The bad sign? He didn’t have the new door panel.

“Have to measure first,” he said.

“But I already gave the measurements to someone at your office.”

“No problem,” he said, measuring away. “I’ll go buy the panel and be back in a little while.”

“But, but ...”

He drove away, into suburban traffic, which can and has swallowed entire convoys of motor vehicles, never to be seen again.

When a contractor disappears on an errand in mid-job, the homeowner becomes a sailor’s wife, anxiously awaiting his return. Your fella may be out there in dangerous waters, doing a dirty job with all his might and main. Or he might just be crocked in some waterfront dive.

Three hours later, he was back, not smelling of alcohol. It only took about an hour to install the panel, at a cost of $175. I thanked Door Guy for his efforts, paid him off and waved a cheery goodbye. Only then did I realize there was something different about my new garage door: The old panel had a lock on it, the new one did not. So I called departed Door Guy on his cell phone. I’m always apologetic when I ask contractors why they screwed up.

“Uh, you didn’t put a lock on the new door.”

“Oh, you want a lock!” He seemed genuinely surprised.

“Well, the two doors don’t match otherwise. Plus there are people — not a lot, I’ll admit — who might enter an unlocked home.”

“A new lock will cost you $85.”

Plus installation. Plus a paint job for both doors. I could hear the calculator.

If this is back to normal, I’m going back to the Taliban.

Glen Slattery’s Fortress of Solitude is in Alpharetta.??