Smarter Than A Monkey

Good Morning!

I'm not sure if I mentioned this...but my apartment is kind of a piece of shit. It's not quite a crack-den, but my landlord has done a lot of the carpentry by himself...and clearly has no business building cupboards/counter-tops from scratch. So when I told him our bathroom doorknob wasn't closing properly, he said he'd gladly fix it...by replacing it with an even older doorknob from his pile of stuff in the garage. Not surprisingly, this one works even worse than the previous knob. And by "works even worse," I mean, "If you pull on it at all, the thing flies out."

As a result, we've taken to very gingerly closing the door...but it still falls out all the time. It was purely an annoyance until the other day...when I locked myself into the bathroom. Here's what happened:

Usually when the handle flies off, it's when the door is still open and we can just pop it back in and we're back in business. But this time, I managed to close the door shut, while simultaneously pulling the knob out. So to be clear: The knob he's "installed" has two parts - the knob that's inside the bathroom fell off, but the other side (with a long metal piece that goes through the hole in the door to connect with the other knob) was still in there - but you can't put the knob back together from that side. If you just push it in, you knock the long part out. And the door is shut.

Realizing I could be stuck in here awhile, I hold off on panicking, do my business, (washed my hands), then take inventory of the situation: I literally couldn't get out of the bathroom. My roommate/bestie, Lauren, had texted me a half hour before saying she was on her way home, so I was thinking I could just wait it out and have her rescue me when she got home. I sat there for a couple minutes, waiting, and then got too bored.

I attempted to stick my fingers into the hole in the door and grab the metal stick to turn the handle, but no dice. I sat back down to regroup.

Bored again after about 30 seconds, I was now determined to make a break for it, on principle alone. If monkeys can use tools, I sure as hell wasn't going to get stuck in my own bathroom until my roommate came home to me whimpering and scratching at the door to let me out. So I started rummaging through the medicine cabinet for something I could use. I found a bobby pin...which if I learned anything from Hollywood, would totally get me out. It did not work. I just bent the shit out of a perfectly good bobby pin. I tried a nail file, a toothbrush handle and my fingers again, to no avail.

Finally, I found nail clippers that seemed to match the shape of the mechanism, wedged them in there and it turned! Not only was I happy to finally break out, but turns out...spending 2 weeks watching the entire "Prison Break" series actually paid off!

First stop, locked in a bathroom at my own fault...next stop...breaking out of a maximum security prison.

Safe & Sound in Astoria,
Jordan

PS, The entire time I was locked in the bathroom, I kept thinking of R. Kelly's 100-part music video, "Trapped in the Closet" (if you can even call it a music video. They weren't even songs. He was basically just singing a poorly written story). Look forward to my remix, "Trapped in the Bathroom."