My Crazy Night with My Wife, Trapped in a Room

So last night was crazy. Elana was already in bed and I closed the bedroom door. I noticed the handle on the outside had been a little wobbly. I’d get to it later. I closed the door and was getting ready for bed. I went to open it again to get something and it would not open. The wobbly handle is the main handle. You know, the male handle that actually opens the door. Without it, my handle from inside had nothing to grab onto.

I said to Elana, “I think we are locked in our room.” Suddenly I realized why the handle on one of the other bedrooms was broken. When I say broken, I mean the wood from the area on the doorframe where the door closes was smashed and broken. I had asked the landlord about it when we moved in, but she clearly didn’t give me full disclosure. Obviously the same thing happened and someone kicked in the door. However, they must have been outside as the door opens into the room.

I was inside, and they built an unbreakable border-lip around the door. Credit cards were useless, because these are high end handles that work by a magnet. And the thingy that actually goes from the door into the door jam (I have no idea if I am calling these things the right thing!) is square, not rounded.

I scoured the room looking for any tool that I could use to wedge the door open. Nothing. Then I found a worthless pocketknife. Other than cutting my finger, it did nothing. We were trapped in our room. I told Elana to open the window and see if anyone was outside below. Of course then I realized my apartment was locked.

Elana said that the neighbor, Ronit, had a key. I said, “She gave it back.” Still, we called out the window at 11:30 PM, to Ronit. Nothing. Several more minutes went by. I said to Elana, “We are going to have to called the police to get us out.” Or course our phones were charging in the kitchen. We would have to wait for a stranger to walk by five stories below. Then Elana started dropping coins from our window to Ronit’s. Like that was going to work.

Suddenly Ronit opened her window and was surprised to see her neighbors trying to wake her. We explained what happened and she said, as I suspected, that she had returned the key. However, after double checking she discovered that she still had one. (We have had several issues with plumbers needing to get into both apartments, so we had given her a key on several occasions.) She came upstairs open the tour. And then I walked her through insertinga the broken handle and rescuing us.

And that is what I did last night before bed.