Keys and Locks are not my friend.

I can’t handle keys.

Let me preface this with a bit of an explanation & background. I used to work as a “conference coordinator” at a private university. This involved living in the on campus housing as the only person in the building unless a camp is using the rooms, and being in possession of all of the master keys for the all of the on campus housing facilities. That’s a pretty big task for someone with my luck, but most of the time I pulled it off without a hitch. There were, however, some hiccups in that ability. This is one such case.

This work also allowed me the ability to sleep late hours and work late hours. It wasn’t uncommon to get phone calls at 2 am every night the weeks I was “on call”, and when I became the official head person, to get 2 am calls the entire summer. This particular story is from a time in which I was on call all summer. I’d been up late the night before helping to sort some things out, and after a few busy weeks had a pretty messy apartment considering I’m a Type A Clean Freak. About a week earlier the maintenance men had been in the building cleaning out the air filters, and for some reason when they removed my old filters instead of taking them out of the apartment they left them in my living room. This caused random dust balls from God knows how long to occasionally blow across the floor like tumbleweed. In addition, they’d shut and locked all of the apartment doors in the building during this run through. I’d kept forgetting to take the dirty filter outside and one morning upon exiting the shower, saw it lying on the floor. In just a towel, I decided to put it outside the door so that I would remember to take it to the trash with me when I left my apartment.

I carried it over, opened up my door and leaned out the door to place it outside. I had my butt just far back enough to keep the door (which automatically locked) from closing. Or so, I thought. With great surprise and to my dismay, I suddenly heard a loud slamming noise from behind me. Apparently my butt was at that time smaller than I thought. Did I mention that I was the only person living in the entire apartment complex, and that this particular apartment complex was the furthest away from campus? Did I also mention that the exterior doors to all of the buildings locked and without that handy dandy keycard which was safely inside my apartment I couldn’t get back in? And the trifecta of this terrible situation, rounding this out from bad to worse was the phone situation. All week long I had walked past the phone in the lobby thinking to myself ‘I really need to replace the cord on that phone in case something happens and someone needs to use it” but as a result of my busyness, exhaustion, and laziness hadn’t yet.

Lets take a moment to recap, shall we? I’m now locked out of my apartment, in nothing but a towel, with all of the master keys and my keycard in my apartment. I can’t run to the closest building over because I don’t have said keycard, and I can’t bust into any of the rooms to use the phones because I don’t have the master keys. I also can’t use the phone in the lobby because I’m a jackass and put off getting the cord.

So, what’s a girl to do? I thought about biting the bullet and walking up to the main part of campus, but there was also construction going on and that would require walking past construction workers in a towel. Come on. Instead, I began walking through the halls hoping upon every shred of hope to find a door unlocked and a phone inside that worked to call my coworkers to come let me in. After circling the whole first floor and not finding one, I decided to regroup and move to plan b. This particular complex had in it an elevator. Inside that elevator was an emergency call button. I’d never had to use it before, but I felt this constituted an emergency. I wasn’t positive who would be on the other end, but I bit the bullet and pushed the button anyways. Suddenly an alarm started in with a robotic voice shouting “THIS IS AN EMERGENCY. ATTENTION. THIS IS AN EMERGENCY.” Seconds later a voice came across the line announcing campus security. I calmly explained it was not an emergency, that I was simply locked out in nothing but a towel and could you please send someone over to let me in. They told me to call the Conference Coordinator, so I had to (with my tail between my legs) explain that was, in fact, me. They said they’d send someone over. Oh good, I thought, my personal hell is over.

Of course that wasn’t true, and as I headed back towards my room I heard voices. This was actually a good sign, as I realized it was probably the maintenance workers who would also have a master key. I ran up to the third floor (again, in just a towel) to see if I could find someone to let me in since I needed to get into work to get some things done ASAP. The first person I spotted was a woman I’m familiar with. I explained my situation and she started walking me down the hallway to find the person with the master key. Normally there are only about 2 maintenance people in the hall at a time, but for some reason in this day there were about 12. All males. All stuck their heads outside the apartments they were in to see what the ruckus was about. Mortifying. Absolutely mortifying.

We finally found the person with the master key, and they let me into the door. I also managed to let security know I made it in before they arrived (they’re pretty quick, obviously). All in all, I made it out with little damage done, but I definitely left my dignity in that room with the keys, and I’m not sure I ever got that back.