Intermatic Balcony Outlet Cover

We have a very small balcony off the living room of our condo. We are so glad we have this additional space just because it’s a great place to sit when the weather is good and we can also have a few plants and flowers year round. It’s not like any garden space we had before in the Midwest or Capitol Hill, but at least a it is something! Since it has a western exposure, it can get quite hot. So we thought we would try to plug in a fan in the outlet to see if it made any difference. The trouble was is we could not open the plastic flip cover no matter how hard we tried. It is made by a company called Intermatic. It was getting more and more frustrating! I looked the brand up on line and watched videos. People just said that it feels like it’s going to break off but pull as hard as you can anyway. It could also be mounted with hinges on the top or the side - but we couldn’t even tell where the hinges were. Then I found the email address and sent a message about our dilemma. They responded with a phone number to call. So as we were calling the number we gave it one more try - but this time we moved the furniture away from it so we could see the space better. We were put on hold. While on hold it became very obvious where the hinges were and I was able to open it without a lot of difficulty. The odd thing was that we thought the hinges would be on top rather than the side. Who would have thought they would be on the side? Anyway, it was really nice to figure it out before we talked to anyone. How could something like this be so complicated?