Petey’s Big Adventure

Homeless or just locked out?

Well, I had quite an adventure this week… On Wednesday I managed to lock myself out, twice… and spent most of the morning trying to get back in.

Wednesday morning I walked out of the house (I was the only one home, as the wife was out of town all day) and went to the car, opened the door, started the car, put my bag in the car, pulled out the brush, and started clearing the snow off the car. Oh, I also closed the car door. This was my first mistake. See, my door lock doesn’t exactly work right. It has this great feature I call “auto-lock” where it remains locked unless you follow a specific procedure. For the last year or so I’ve managed to follow this procedure every time I’ve opened the door. Except this time.

I quickly realized I’m locked out of the car. And the car is running. And my keys are in the car. And my bag is in the car. Not good.

The spare key for the car is with the wife, who is more than an hour away, and has meetings for the next 12 hours. Even more not good.

The nearest house key is at school with my daughter, but I can’t easily get there. Also not good, but not bad, as she has a half-day, and will be home within 5 hours.

What to do… I manage to get into the garage, as that door was not locked. Of course I could only open it 1/3rd of the way, so I slid under it onto the solid sheet of ice that is the garage floor. Luckily, I have a weird assortment of tools in the garage, so I went to work fashioning a tool to break into the car. I was unsuccessful. I also attempted to break into the house. No luck.

I called the property manager, but he was in a meeting. I waited for him to call back, while sitting on a lawn chair, in the middle of the garage.

At this point I just had to kill time… how do you kill time without spending much money? The library!

Sadly, the library didn’t open until 9:30, and it wasn’t even 8:45. I ended up going to the Lumber Inn for breakfast (since mine was locked in the car) and by 9:15 I headed over to the library. I wandered around City Hall, which took approximately 4 minutes, and then waited for the library to open.

A delivery guy went into the library, I asked if it was open yet, he said no. Then a woman came into the building, stuck her arm near a wall, and went into the library. I was intrigued by this and thought I should try it. When I got to the door, I saw a card reader that I assumed she used. Nevertheless, the door was open. I walked in… slowly… and the library staff stared at me like I was planning on stealing all the books. I asked if they were open and they said “Not yet, a few more minutes” and then the woman I saw said “Oh, sorry! I must not have closed the door!” So I said asked if I should leave and come back in a few minutes, and they said yes and made me go wait outside the doors for the next few minutes. No. I’m not kidding. They kicked me out of the library and told me to come back when they were open, which, by now, was roughly 120 seconds into the future. If I had talked any slower, or asked more questions, I probably could have run the clock down. But yeah, they tossed me out. Crazy.

So I sat on the steps for about 100 seconds or so, and about 6 people came into the building all at the same time… 9:30 exactly. I assume they all know there is no way you’ll get into the library early.

We get in and about 4 of us head straight for the computers. Online at last! I manage to check email again, and do a few things for work, and finally by 10:45 the property manager calls, and he tells me he’ll meet me at the house and let me in.

I get back to the house and he lets me in, and tells me he has a car guy that can get me in the car for $50. I figured that I’d just let it run since I had less than $15 in gas in the tank. By the way, I got 0 mpg that day…

Once inside the house, I was able to get a bit more work done. The kids finally got home (half-day!) and I shared the story with them. I then devised a plan to siphon the gas from the car so it wouldn’t consume it all. I tested the siphoning in the house with water, then went outside, only to realize I couldn’t get to the gas tank since the release lever was inside the car. I tried to break into that as well. Unsuccessfully.

Eventually (8:45 that night) the wife came home, unlocked my car (which locked again, which I then unlocked again) and I shut it off, and got my bag out of it. The car didn’t run out of gas, but it was about 80 degrees in the car and the butter and cheese I had in my lunch bag were a bit melty.

I wished my bag wasn’t in the car, because it had files on it wanted to work on. Now you CloudFreaks™ will tell me I should keep all my files “in the cloud” but my files consisted of hundreds of hi-res photos that were over 5GB. Even if they were online, it would have taken me a full day to download them all.

So the moral of the story is, I’m ordering a lock pick set. OK, that’s not really a moral, but it’s what I’m doing.