Repost Sunday: Use Your Garage Door Opener And Rule The World

I rerun some of my older posts on Sundays as a way to highlight stories that you may have missed. Just think of it as 'thought recycling' and a day off, or that I am incredibly, incredibly lazy. Besides, they raced the Daytona 500 and played the NBA All-Star Game today so who was going to be reading my blog anyway. This was originally posted December 4th, 2006.

I just read an AP story about how a frequency being used by the government at Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, the home of NORAD, is affecting the garage door openers of nearby residents. The story says that people within a 10-mile radius were most affected but because the signal is sent from a mountaintop, it could be further reaching. The frequency is being tested as a possible alert system if there were ever a homeland security threat. Obviously that’s pretty serious stuff. I mean it involves the military, testing, communications frequencies, NORAD’s facility and lest we forget, garage door openers.

I don’t want to pick on anyone here, but what scares me is that from reading the story I got the impression that this was a surprise to people. I find it hard to believe that the government would start testing emergency communications and fail to realize the frequency they chose was the same frequency that most garage door openers in the country operate on. Oops. Maybe the folks at Cheyenne Mountain are busy preparing to track Santa on Christmas Eve and forgot to verify the frequency. If I lived in the area, I certainly wouldn’t mind the problem. After all, what better excuse could you have for being late to work or having to call in sick than not being able to leave your home because of a secret military broadcast that’s jamming the signal of your garage door opener. Ok, I know you could manually open it, but that doesn’t sound as James Bondish, does it.

I can remember as a child back when Ronald Regan was President that the same thing would happen here in Southern California. Whenever Air Force One would land at two of our local Air Force bases (which are both closed now by the way), the radio news would report instances of people in the area having trouble with garage doors. Wouldn’t that be a great game to play if elected President? You could fly all over the country, circle certain neighborhoods and leave them wondering why their garage doors stopped working all of a sudden. Then after you’ve been impeached for misusing taxpayers’ money you could include a chapter about your garage door escapades in your memoir and make millions.

It seems to me that we all got very lucky with this same frequency issue. Think about what would have happened if the roles had been reversed. Can you imagine getting home from a long day of working or dreaded Christmas shopping and pressing that big button on your garage door remote only to have it not work? The only thing is, it did work, just not on your garage door. When you finally get into the house, your turn on the news and it’s reporting the launch of a missile, satellite or the unexpected broadcast of secret military orders. All of a sudden several unmarked cars show up and they have a lot of questions. You show them your garage door remote and they all hit the ground to duck and cover. Then our government has to try to avoid an international incident and apologize at the UN for the accidental garage door remote operated firing of a ballistic missile. OK, it’s a little far fetched, but I think we should all be happy that the government jammed our remotes instead of something else happening.

To the government’s credit, the story reports that they have stopped using the current frequency until they figure out how to fix the problem. If they’re having trouble finding a new frequency, I’ve got the location on the dial of an easy listening station in our area that I would certainly recommend turning over for government use…