The Locksmith

Art Collective's closet has been locked for about a year and a half due to a missing key. Because I rarely contribute anything of an artistic nature to the organization, I volunteered to take care of installing a new lock. This idea was stupid on my part because while I'm not artsy, I'm not handy either. Honestly, I felt accomplished after merely finding the lock by myself at Lowe's.

I naively head to the laundry room where the closet is, thinking I can install it with relatively little trouble. Of course, before I can install the new lock, I have to get rid of the old one, a major problem that didn't occur to me beforehand. Hmm... maybe a hammer will do it. I hammer at the lock for a few minutes; though it's not any closer to coming off, I have managed to dent it beyond recognition. Good thing I have a new lock waiting! I ponder new ways to approach the problem to no avail. Well, hammering was fun anyway, let's keep doing that. It's loud. A freshman comes in. "What are you doing?" I'm trying to break this lock. "Are you supposed to be doing that?" Are you supposed to be washing your whites with your colors? Shut up. I keep hammering for nearly ten minutes until I've knocked the front of the lock off the door. Woo hoo! But wait, the back of the lock is still attached!

Because the closet walls do not come all the way to the ceiling, it is possible to climb over the top. I push a dryer against the closet and use it to hoist myself over the edge, dangerously dropping myself into a pit of art supplies. Am I bleeding? Scratches are okay, blood is not. Seeing no blood, I hammer at the other side until that has fallen off in a crinkled metallic mess. Alas, the bolt is still intact, and that's what's keeping the door locked. Plus, I'm now stuck in the closet. I stack art supplies into a pile high enough to hoist myself back.

A hammer is not going to do for this last part. Pliers? I ply at it for several minutes until it becomes a withered mess and breaks off. Perhaps not the most efficient way to take care of that, but a success nonetheless. Let's put this new puppy in. Damn, there's a lot of pieces. The instructions are of no help because they're not in English. Sure, there's a section labeled as being English, but the series of codes and numbers is not a dialect that I speak, and I'm an English major to boot, so I wing it. It works! It works! For some reason I have at least four pieces leftover that should have been a part of this lock, but it seems to operate without them, so we're just going to pretend they were bonus materials or something.

Later, when I go to make the proud announcement of having successfully replaced the lock, I misplace the keys and break into a total panic. They were in my pocket all along, but in that moment I wanted to take a hammer to my own head.

If you're ever locked out of your home, give me an hour and a hammer and I'll take care of it for you.