Damsel in Distress

Raise your hand if you've been held captive in your own home four times within a span of 15 hours.

What's that? Am I the only one with my hand raised? Shocking.

I've come to realize that living in an apartment means that things break a lot. However, it also means that people come to fix your stuff for you for free! This is excellent news for me since, by nature, as a girly girl I'm incredibly gifted at breaking things. And, by nature, as a girly girl I'm incapable of fixing things on my own.

Exhibits A and B of my girlyness: I wear tiaras in public and in private. (When in private, preferably while crafting and drinking wine.)

I'm the type that won't complain about something until the final breakage happens and leaves me locked in a room, stuck on the side of a road, cleaning up a flooded bathroom, etc. The door knob to my bedroom has been fidgety for the past week, but I have been choosing to ignore it.

It becomes impossible to ignore the problem on Sunday night when the door knob breaks completely and I become locked in my room. I stand with a dog that I know really needs to go to the bathroom in one hand while my other hand tugs and turns at the door knob to no avail. After a solid two minutes of knob turning, I decide  the knob is dead and I am trapped. So I grab my phone to call my roommate (who is very confused about why I'm waking her up via phone when I'm one room away) to rescue me. Too late for the dog since she's already peed and pooped on the carpet, but I learn my lesson and leave the door cracked open before I drift off to sleep.

Fast forward to 2 a.m.

The puppy wakes me up because she needs to pee. The puppy always needs to pee. I drag myself out of bed so she can relieve herself and then lope back to my room. In my grogginess, I forget that I have a broken door knob and close the door before crawling back into bed. I don't realize my mistake until 7:30 a.m. when I once again can't get out of my room to let the dog out. More poop and pee for me to clean up, and another rescue mission from my roommate.

Then as I'm scurrying around getting ready for work, I close the door again. That makes three lock-ins. I call the apartment complex on my way to work and beg them to send maintenance over to fix my door ASAP before I trap myself again. I also mention that we've been having trouble with the locks on our front door and ask them to take a look at that, too.

I come home during my lunch break and joyously discover that my door knob is fixed. Hooray! The note from the maintenance guy also says "dead bolt adjusted." Since both the normal lock and dead bolt hadn't been working, I take it upon myself to test both of them.

My actions and inner thought process during the testing of the locks takes place as follows:

(Click normal lock into lock and unlock position)
"Splendid! It's fixed!"
(Lock the dead bolt and discover it will not unlock)
"Well darn. This one is still stuck."
(Fidgeting, fidgeting, fidgeting)
"Wait, this is really stuck."
(Put dog down to allow for lock-turning using both hands)
"daflbkhaeroituaoihbakifdg"
(Full body weight now attempting to turn one little piece of brass for the duration of five minutes until I hear a snapping/cracking noise)
"Well crap. Did I just break that?"
(One last attempt at fidgeting)
"Yep."
(Puppy looks up expectantly)
"We're trapped."
(Puppy goes back to running around in circles)

So happened lock-in #4. This wouldn't be too great of a problem were it not for the fact that I accidentally left my phone at the office. Which means that I have to resort to Gchat and beg my friend to call the apartment complex for me to explain my current predicament. Thanks, Charlotte!

Meanwhile, I try (and fail) to get the screen off the window that connects to the front porch then try (and fail) to use a screwdriver to get the lock off the door. After my failings, I succumb to the reality that I am a prisoner in my own home and settle down next to the window awaiting my rescuer's arrival. Very Rapunzel-esque, don't you think? If only I could have such wonderful hair, too.

Tangent: I've been growing my hair out for two years. It's nowhere close to being long. Oh Rapunzel, how I envy you.

January 2010: My hair is short and I love Chipotle.

January 2012: The Aussies are in town! And after 730 days, my hair has barely made it to a length that can be deemed "medium."

Slowest growing hair ever, right? Back to my story.

My rescuer arrives after a few minutes and laughs at me while tugging the window screen off. Our only option is for him to climb through the window since you can only get to the dead bolt from inside the apartment. As it turns out, the screen was screwed into the window pane from outside. So while I can be a little dense in these types of situations, I was actually incapable of getting the screen off. That upped my ego a bit.

Straight out of a fairytale, maintenance man climbs through the window and into my apartment to release me from my prison. Of course it only takes him approximately six seconds to get the dead bolt off the door, but this is his job. He gets paid to fix stuff like this. I get paid to write about animals. Not qualified for predicaments involving tools.

So anyway, I finally get out. The fairy tale metaphor ends there, though, because there are no singing birds to celebrate my freedom and no true love's kiss to break a witch's spell. Just rain, a whiny dog, and maintenance man #2 who has just arrived and is also laughing at me.

And there you have it. I am a damsel in distress. Ridiculous scenarios follow me wherever I go. For further proof of this, please see details concerning my dealings with public transportation, circus graveyards, and flouncy pieces of clothing.