This tells you how behind I am in writing. I'm bring it all back to the first weekend in October. Conference weekend wasn't too exciting here. We decided to honor General Conference by staying in our pajamas all morning and eating hootenannies on Sunday morning (any Petersen's out there know the correct spelling of that word? Anyone else out there even know what I'm talking about?) Staying in our pj's all morning was pretty easy since I believe we woke up around noon. I think there had been some noisy people outside our window late the night before, or we were just that lazy.Conference didn't start until 6pm here which meant it ended at midnight. On Sunday night we decided to go for a walk between the sessions. As soon as we closed the front door Andrew turned to me with a very panicked look on his face and asked if I'd left the keys in the other side of the door. This is something he lives in fear of daily. If you leave keys in the door on the inside of the apartment then you can't use your keys on the outside of the door to get in, and you have to turn the key to open the door. I had noticed keys in the door as we were walking out but I figured that Andrew would grab them and carry them with us on the walk. I was wrong.
Our quick little walk turned into a four hour quest to get back into our apartment which was not locked but just inaccessible. After staring at the door, kicking the door, cussing at the door, trying to yell at Cat through the door to pull the keys out of the lock, and doing anything else we could think of to get the keys out of the lock, we walked up to Andrew's office to get the number for our landlord. He wasn't even sure he'd have it there but somewhere in an old email he found it . We tried calling him and then walked home with some paperclips we were hoping to use to push the keys out of the lock from the outside of the door. Surprisingly that didn't work. Around this time we could hear Cat inside the door meowing to be let out.
We finally gave up and called a Spanish friend and asked him to call a locksmith for us. We couldn't even do that on our own, not speaking the language. He found a guy who said he'd do it for 120 Euros max but he'd be another hour before he could get here. That was our cheapest options so we went with him and tried to get a little sleep on the steps outside our door until he came. At around 12.30am he showed up, took a look at the door and told us it would be 167 Euros. That's $250 to open a door that wasn't even locked. I had to run downstairs to the ATM to grab more cash for him and before I'd hit the bottom step he'd opened the door. $250 for 3 minutes of work. By my calculations he makes about $5000/hr.
And then when he got the door open he poked his head in the apartment and asked Andrew how much we paid for rent. He kind of screwed up his face when Andrew told him and made some gesture indicating we were paying too much. He asked where we were from and indicated that's why we were getting screwed. He should know since that's why he'd charged us 50 Euros more than his highest quote for a job that could have only been easier if we'd left the door open a crack.
7 comments:
Surprised I didn't see you there, I had sweet seats. I got some pushback from those mormon security guys for not wearing a shirt.
I'm sorry to hear about your ordeal with the locksmith. We locked ourselves out of our place a couple of months ago. Luckily one of our upstairs windows was open and we found someone with a ladder. Lauritz couldn't bear to pay the management company $40 to come and unlock it. I don't know what he would have done if we had to have paid $250!
40$! What a steal! I'm pretty sure we had left one of our balcony doors open but I was not about to let Andrew tried and climb in to our sixth story window from the roof no matter how much Spiderman he's watched and tried to immitate.
Actually his boss Lynn did the same thing as he was leaving for the airport a few years ago. He grabbed the porter of his apartment building and had him knock on the upstairs neighbor's door. He ran in, saw a piece of rope and swung himself over her balcony into his own. The porter and the old woman neighbor were absolutely freaked out but Lynn doesn't speak Spanish so he was able to ignore their objections. I guess he had to try to convince the portere to swing the rope a bit to get himself over to his balcony and the porter had a look of terror on his face. But Lynn got in, got his keys and his passport and made his flight home.
Correction: Lynn (Marie seems to think everyone needs to be on a first-name basis with my boss, for some reason...) did not make his flight. And his porter has never trusted him again.
Hey, I asked if he made his flight and you said you didn't know. And "Lynn" is a whole lot easier than "Mister Briggs".
Ah. The lessons of life we must learn.
Actually, I'm impressed you're taking this so well. I'd have probably put myself in the hospital by mentally reliving the event.
Love, Dad
We fared a lot better than a friend of ours who had her purse stolen with her apartment keys in it. She had to hang around the streets until 7am when she could call her landlord. Of course, we only had ourselves to blame for that one.
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