Saturday, May 28, 2005

Locked Out!

Every once in a while we do something daft and make a fool of ourselves. When it happens, we dont fell good at all about being in a spot, but later on the story brings a smile on your face and giggles on others'. :-)

Why am I saying all this? I did something daft for a change. I certainly did not plan it but it happened something like this. The apartment that I live in has an automatic spring lock that locks the door when shut. You need to then have the key to open it from the outside.

Suffice it to say that keen on going to play a few games of table tennis, I picked up my paddle and rushed out of my apartment forgetting to take the keys. I had a good hour playing TT and when it ended, I couldn't find the keys to my apartment on me! Anyone who would have seen me at that moment of discovery would have seen a Merry Melodies donkey with a balloon over its head saying "DUNCE"! That is exactly how I felt anyway.

I tried to go down to the reception hoping to find the spare key, but to my chagrin, the staff had all left. The one member of the staff who lives in one of the apartments here happened not to find her spare keys and I was out there wet with sweat on a chilly winter evening and the temperature was falling below 10 degrees. Brrrr....

Necessity is the mother of invention they say; I say desperation is the gateway to all sorts of ideas. I started trying to find out a way of entering my apartment without a key. My apartment is on the first floor and I cannot hope to climb up a sheer wall on the roadside without any number of misfortunes befalling me (no pun intended) so I had to smother that idea even as it had begun to form. Then I spotted my bedroom window. This might be more plausible. First I had to remove the netting. This I managed to do without much ado after a few minutes of pulling, pushing and sliding until it eventually came off in my hands. That accomplished (without anyone spotting me and mistakenly calling the police) I had to figure out a way to undo the spring latch on the inside of the glass window to slide it open. I needed something thin and long that I could insert through the small gap between the jamb and the latch. I borrowed a pen-knife from my manager's home and he came out to help me in my efforts. We tried hard but we were not able to reach the latch with the small pen-knife and we could not find any other implement to help our cause. I had to give up after half an hour of trying and all of a sudden I started feeling the cold again.

My manager was good enough to ask me to sleep at his house for the night and I had no other option anyway so I accepted. My major dis-satisfaction now was I could not get to the nice soft chappathis and sprouted moong masala that I had cooked for dinner before going out to play. To add to the misery, I had invited another colleague to dinner and now I had to tell him that he would have to find dinner someplace else. Talk about adding insult to injury!

I sat in my manager's contemplating my not-so-comfortable position, with Manorama making wise-cracks in Thillana Mohanambal on the telly, when thanks to Dame Luck, the resident staff called up to say that she had managed to find the spare key to my apartment. How happy I felt, I cannot express in words.

So the story ended in a "happy ever after" note with me able to go have a nice shower and dig into my dinner and tuck myself cozily into bed.

Hope you dont ever forget your keys and wish you a nice weekend. Ciao! :-)

3 comments:

Pal said...

Smashinguy...you tried breaking into your house...that's unbelievable...a person like you doing such a thing...it's beyond my imagination...by the way, kai vasam oru nalla kai-tholil vachi-irukkae sollu.

Smashinguy said...

Like I said Pal, Desperate Times...Desperate Measure. :-)

Anonymous said...

Thiruttu payyan da nee.