Locked Out

Also, God Mocks Me

I can never lead a normal life and here's why:

I finally get out of work tonight at about 11 pm, exasperated from a hard and unecessarily annoying night of work. My phone battery sucks, so I often turn it off when I'm not using it. As I'm walking to my car, I turn my pitiful phone back on (god, I hate it) to see if I can glean another second of battery usage and check messages. To my surprise, I have two new voicemails. Two new voicemails? I don't even know two people. And so it begins.

"Hey Magen, it's Lauren. I locked myself out of your house. I'm at Jack in the Box using some Mexican guy's cell phone. I think your phone is dead. I guess I'll just wait outside."

Next message.

"Hi Magen, it's Mom. Lauren said she's locked out..? What's going on?"

End of new messages.

Sigh. I am now on my knees and face down in the parking lot wondering why I had given my sister the only set of keys to the house. My coworker spots me on the ground and walks over to me.

"What's wrong? Why are you on your knees and face down in the parking lot?"

I explain what happened, red in the face, holding back nary a swear. She kindly agrees to help me out and we head to the house to assess the situation. We finally arrive, and after attempting to determine how my sister could sit outside for FOUR hours and have neither gathered nuts/berries nor whittled a key from a nearby tree, we decide on calling a locksmith.

Thirty-five minutes and several cigarettes later (I took up smoking for dramatic effect), our swashbuckling hero arrives. Complete with an underwhelming tool kit that looks alarmingly like mine (which consists of a hammer from Ikea, a rusty wrench, and some jelly beans), flip flops (shouldn't he have on boots or something?), and wearing what I'm almost certain is woman's perfume, he scratches his head and tells us he can't pick the lock. Of course he can't. Why would a locksmith be able to pick a lock? It's not like he's, oh I don't know, a LOCKSMITH or something! I finally understand how Nancy Kerrigan must've felt. Why me, indeed.

His weirdly excessive giggling and total incompetence notwithstanding (and to make a long, not-so-exciting story shorter), I will give him credit for finally shimmying his way into a second story window. After he charged us an extra seventy-five bucks, of course.

The moral of the story, as anti-climactic as it may be, is: getting locked out is only funny when it's not happening to you.