Adventures in garage-door repair, with James Lileks:

I pushed it back into place, ran the door down, and discovered something: the end of a cotter pin that’s been there for nine years had managed to turn itself around 90 degrees so it plucked the edge of the sensor bracket as it travelled up. For a moment I felt like a prison warden discovering a six-mile tunnel dug with spoons and thimbles – you have to admire the effort, the ingenuity, the sheer determination. The pin was trying to escape. Day after day, year after year, it had been trying to pull itself out – but like escapees who run into a brick foundation from an old building razed decades before (why didn’t you tell us, Pops? I didn’t know! There was never anything there, not even when I came here in ’21!) it hadn’t counted on the sensor bracket giving the game away.

How could it have?