Well that was relatively painless

Got a call from the Sainted Bride at lunch. She was home. The garage door opener didn't work. Fortunately, it decided to quit working while her car was outside, rather than inside. I thought it was a great excuse to leave work early, so I planned to cancel my standing 3:00 meeting.

Didn't happen.

An issue came up in manufacturing that would need to be discussed at the meeting. No problem, I thought, it's just an update to the meeting participants, with request for suggestions after the already-determined course of action that was already in progress. Shouldn't take more than 15 minutes.

Didn't happen.

Meeting drifted off onto other tangentially related issues. Before you say, "Dude, why didn't you, as the meeting leader, keep the meeting on your agenda?", be advised that there are some big dogs at this meeting. If they decide to drift, it's out of my control. And it's not like these were unimportant things to discuss, so I let them drift.

Upshot: didn't get away from work until almost 4:00. Didn't get home until almost 5:30 (typical is 6:00). Grabbed a beer and started in on the garage door opener. Checked the obvious first (circuit breaker, etc.). Grabbed a circuit tester and tested the wires plugged into the back (actually a useless exercise, I quickly realized, because these are only for the stop sensors). Then I swapped its plug with the one for the garage overhead light.

Success (while the light switch was on, of course). Checked the garage light in the other outlet. Worked. Swapped them back. All still worked.

So I guess all that happened what that perhaps the outlet accumulated some dust that buggered up the connection, or something like that. Anyway, opener is back online. And before 6:00. Not bad for a rookie. This weekend, I'll try to blow out the outlet with some compressed air to do the job better. But for now, I have another beer and I'm good.