Getting locked out C or D?

*(i think actually five copies!!)

Some people just don't have any imagination.

(For a second there I thought you sentence was going to be "We used to have a letter slot that if I was desperate I could crap through" Suzy, which would have certain.ly changed my image of you. As it happens if you'd lived in Protsmouth in the summer of 2001 crapping through the postbox of pediatricians was almost a daily occurance.)

of course you have to know how to "make him your own"

Imagine my shock/awe as my dad came home and, very swiftly and professionally, managed to open the door with his credit card.

(Oh and I denied trying to pick the lock with a petractor, "Must've been bloody burglars." Yes dad.)

Locking yourself and your at-the-time 2-year-old sun out in the pouring rain in January when it's 10 degrees fahrenheit outside AND being locked out of your car WHICH IS RUNNING = DUD, obv.

so i took a taxi home, but somewhere the previous night i'd lost my key. so there was a) a ladder and b) an open second storey window, but i decided to heed the doctors' orders and not risk it. i got one of the neighbours to do it, but i think he thought my "i'd do it but i've got a concussion" was a little weak.

so at about half-past nine this morning i nipped out to buy a paper and a pint of milk. standing in the shop, i realised i hadn't got my fucking keys, and my flat door and the security door were both yale-locked behind me.

this is the first time in living memory i've done this ... oh, no, hang on, there was that time i went from blackpool to manchester and forgot my dad's house keys, meaning i had to wake him up at 2am ... but still.

LUCKILY i had my wallet. LUCKILY a bus turned up almost immediately. UNLUCKILY the bus contained the world's most annoying small child, who spent half the journey kicking my seat and whining, and the other half going: "the man shouted at me."

LUCKILY my girlfriend was at her desk when i rang her from a callbox. (callboxes are a) hard to find, and b) shit.)

so now i'm home, having wasted precisely an hour of my life. and i don't have time to go to the gym. BASTARDRY.

that said: reading the tales of woe on this thread, i think i had a lucky escape.

one other thing i'm enormously grateful for: that i didn't put a pot of coffee on the stove while nicking over to the shop. hmm. that would have been potentially disastrous. don't think i'll ever do that again.

one time a few years ago, before fun ceased to be an acquaintance of mine, I was out at a club and met a few guys I knew and decided to go back to their friend's house for a beer or two.

anyway we got to the area the house was in, somewhere in South Dublin, around 4 in the morning or so. And when we got to the house the friend's girlfriend had left her keys in the door so he couldn't open it.

in the end after some debate and discussion about how pleased she'd be to find 5 or 6 still high strangers outside at 4am we decided the only thing to do was to ring the bell. however no amount of ringing seemed to wake her. the guy who owned the house then tried calling her phone, but it was off.

at this stage we were all kind of gagging for a beer and it was freezing, then it transpired that her bedroom was the front window at the top of the house. so first, again after some weak resistance from boyfriend guy, we threw a few sticks at the window and stuff.

this didn't work, you'd think she was ignoring all this but apparently she was actually asleep.

so then somebody had the idea that one of us would climb up the rather huge palm tree they had in the front garden and then knock on the window. so one guy volunteered and he pulled himself up with a bit of help from everyone.

he got to the top and everything was going fine, except that he couldn't reach the window. so we figured that the only thing to do was to swing the tree back and forth until he got close enough. so we began doing that.

at first he was only close enough to tap it, then he got close enough to knock it, then finally he gave it a big wallop or two, and just as he did there was a huge cracking noise and he was flung across the garden holding about 12 feet of palm tree!

then the light came on and the guy's gf opened the door to see this giant broken palm tree and the injured climber, and everyone else practically dying from laughter.

heh. nice one.

this cautionary tale, from an FoF:

Yesterday I had the worst day of my life.

In the morning I have a routine as many people do. I get up, turn the radio on, lie in bed for about half-an-hour, get up, put my dressing gown on, gather my towel and head to the shower via the toilet.

Yesterday I did all of this as normal, except when I went to unlock the door, the key snapped and I was trapped inside my toilet. Four white walls, a small window with bars across, a toilet and a cork-tiled floor. I don't think I realised quite how difficult a position I was in for some time. My housemate had already gone to work for the day.

I tried and tried with the end of the shaft to unlock the door, when this failed I even tried to smash the door down, but it opens inwards so I couldn't and I was trapped. I had no watch, did not know what time it was. I sat on the toilet and pondered my situation: what was I going to do? I had nothing to read. There was no sink, bath or shower, just a solitary toilet.

I knew that there was a good chance that my flat-mate Jamie would be back in the evening, however there was even the possibility that he would stay round his girlfriend's for the night or even the entire weekend...this was something that I didn't even want to contemplate. I heard the door-bell go a few times (one of which was my colleague who was worried that work had had no news of my whereabouts), I heard my phone go off every half-hour or so. I was trapped and couldn't do anything.

I had a sudden MacGyver moment and tried to create a device which would help me, but you can't make much out of an empty loo roll and a broken key. And I always was crap with handiwork. Then I thought about using the electricity from the lightbulb wire to burn through the bars but realised that this was a dangerous and stupid thing to do. And it probably wouldn't have worked.

When you're in this situation weird things happen to you. You try to think about interesting things. You think about all the small details and you make an action plan. I was going to wait until my flatmate came home and if he didn't I was going to attract the attentions of my neighbours leaving in the next morning for work (for them to call the Fire Brigade or Police or something) by shouting and stamping at the top of my voice. This was my plan and I was sticking by it. If they didn't hear me then the water in the toilet would sustain me until my housemate was to show up.

Without a watch I could not work out what time it was so I spent lots of time listening to the what was going on outside - I heard the cheers of children - school was over, I heard the construction work stop (it must have been the end of the day, say 5.30pm). I heard the distant rumble of tube trains deep below get further and further apart (it must be towards the end of the tubes).

Finally at 12.30am, when I had lost all hope that my flatmate was not coming home, he returned and I shouted and shouted. He eventually handed me some pliers through the window and I managed to grab the end of the key shaft and turn the key. When I was out I was a trembling wreck and stumbled to the kitchen for a long drink of water and some food. I had spent over 16 hours trapped inside my toilet and my legs were shaking all over. But my ordeal was now finished. Never before have I been so happy to see Jamie come home, even if he was completely drunk. I checked my phone - 4 messages and 36 unanswered calls. Oops.

On the plus side me and Paris Hilton now have something in common. I'll use this blog to send her a message. Come and talk to me baby, we've both been through solitary confinement and we both share a common bond: that of stupidity.

But what have I learnt? Never to lock the toilet when I'm the only person in the house. I'd laugh if it happened to anyone else. I'll gradually learn to laugh at this story, but what a day!

copied from http://henotbusybeingbornisbusydying.blogspot.com/2007/06/im-locked-in-tight-im-out-of-range.html

jesus christ. i feel positively lucky now.

I once locked myself out of my first floor flat on the Friday when my two flatmates had cleared off to Glastonbury for the weekend. I had to go and get a ladder from the bowling club across the road and climb up in a stupidly short skirt with people laughing at me, then roll myself in headfirst through my bedroom window.

But what have I learnt? Never to lock the toilet when I'm the only person in the house.

ever since reading this, i have left the door wide open!

The only time I ever locked myself in the bathroom at my own house I just kicked the door in. I was pissed at the time though.

WTF Charlie. That is one story...

(who has a toilet with a key?)

have once left the house and double locked the yale on the front door not realising that that meant the person still in the flat was locked inside. oops.

GARETH DID THAT TO ME WHEN I FIRST MET HIM!!! /\

A friend of ours was staying over once and had to leave in the morning before anyone else, and the door was yale locked even when everyone was home becase we'd had INTRUDER problems. So he unlocked the door with the key we'd given him, shut the door and locked it from the outside - and then for some never discovered reason left the key in the lock. We had to clear out all the junk stored in our coal cellar in order to get to the door that led into the rubbish-strewn basement front yard area.

My ex-boyfriend's flat had a normal bathroom lock slidey-over thing ON THE OUTSIDE OF THE DOOR, just perfect for pranking flatmates and leaving them locked in the toilet. I never quite understood why this was. Seriously, why?

Charlie's story is utterly terrifying!

> ON THE OUTSIDE OF THE DOOR

i have seen this too, both inside and outside. was on the top edge of the door as well. for keeping kids out of the bathroom?

my bedroom door is actually an old front door and so has yale lock and deadbolts on the inside, non-functional and under 6 layers of paint but still there.

this thread reminds me to have some more keys cut.

I got locked out by the landlord's maintenance workman, who'd been round to fix the kitchen tap, but locked both locks on our door, including the deadlock which we never used and didn't carry the key for.

I phoned the landlord and the letting agent but couldn't get hold of either of them, so in the end my wife turned the key in the yale lock to open that one and I kicked the door open. Did a good job though, just popped the lock straight off without damaging the door.

Toilets with key locks: off the top of my head, both my grandmothers' houses (60-70 years old?), so presumably once quite common. And, y'know, if it still works why switch it for some cheap crap turny-bolt thing? Except presumably all the locks and keys are getting kind of elderly by now. Something new to be nervous about at my gran's. At least it's a bathroom, not just a toilet, and the cabinet probably contains enough random junk to attack locks with.

Oh, and a house party I was at where someone got locked in the only toilet/bathroom for a good few hours on Sunday morning while everyone was hungover, which was not well timed. The key didn't snap but the bolt part of the lock mechanism fell out of place still inside the lock so you couldn't move it. A still-wobbly morning-after friend was extracted through the 1st floor window down a ladder, people dismantled the external locks on both sides (having climbed through the window with a toolkit), and used pliers on what was left.

Back in high school, some friends and I went to a Sublime show at the Capitol Ballroom in DC (where Buzz used to be held). This was the first time my parents had ever let me go out to a show on a school night. Owing to madcap post-show drug adventures, I didn't get dropped off at my house until about 4 a.m.

I turned my key in the lock and heard a strange click. When I tried to pull the key out, the tumbler and various small metal pieces fell out on the porch, leaving the door locked. I sat out on the porch, completely bewildered for an hour, occasionally - and ineptly - trying to fit the pieces of the lock back together. According to the stipulations my folks had set for me, I was only supposed to have been out until 1 a.m. and I definitely wasn't supposed to come home smelling like a brick of weed.

I gave up and rang the doorbell. It took a few minutes of ringing to rouse my mom, bleary-eyed and scowling, who was able to open the door from the inside. I guess this doesn't actually qualify as being locked out, since someone inside was able to remedy the situation for me, but I'm still very impressed with the God of Locksmithery who chose to screw me so righteously at such an inopportune moment.