Stuck at Work

As I was trying to leave work yesterday, the security gate over the parking garage exit refused to go up.  This has never happened before.  Just a minute before I had seen it working, since a cyclist had triggered the gate when they left.  But it wasn’t budging for me when I got there.  I tried backing up and re-approaching the gate – no luck.  I tried parking the car walking round and trying to open the gate from the outside – no luck.  By then the security guard at the front desk had seen me and was also trying to help – but he couldn’t get the gate to open either.  So there I was stuck at the office, whilst the security guard called an engineer out to look at it – whilst all I could think was how long I would be stuck at the office for.  And in no mood to do any work.  There were a few other cars but not many at this time – after all is was 7pm so wouldn’t expect many people to still be at work.  So just settling in back at my desk for the evening, imagining I was going to be here for several more hours, when I got a call about 10 minutes later from the security guard telling me the gate had apparently fixed itself.  Someone else had been able to leave the garage without any issues.  So I got to my car and tried to exit again, and thankfully I was able to this time.  Weird.  Since we have to go through a car park barrier before the gate, my theory is that for whatever reason the barrier didn’t trigger the gate when I tried to exit the first time, but if I had re-triggered the barrier then the gate would probably have opened when I approached it.  Oh well, at least by the time I left the traffic was much clearer!