Locked in our Bedroom

Russ and I were chatting yesterday and he asked me if I remember the time we were locked in our bedroom. I, of course, said yes and then said that I should totally blog about it because it is so funny! So, here goes:

When Russ and I got married, we moved into this ghetto townhouse down by the railroad tracks. It was on the right side of the tracks, but was still ghetto. We were always have problems with the place. Our upstairs bathroom leaked through the ceiling and our water heater grew mushrooms while we lived there. We also had some scary neighbors who I'm pretty sure were drug dealers. This was not a good situation at all!

Well, one of the problems we kept having is that we had a couple of doors that had door knobs that would stick. Our bedroom door was one of them. For some reason, we always shut our bedroom door at night. We really had no reason to do that. I guess it was just habit. So, we go to bed one evening and wake up the next morning and I get up to go to the restroom and I can't get the door open. What in the world?!?!? I pull and I tug and I get sweaty and by this time I have to go so bad that I'm starting to do the potty dance. So Russ tries and fails to get the door open. Now, we are about late to work so I have to call my boss and leave a message saying I was stuck in my bedroom! I was so afraid that he wouldn't believe me!

Well, I had called about this problem a few times and the landlord never did anything about it so I called him. He didn't answer (of course! This landlord was the worst landlord ever....he was also a cop but got fired from the force for being "unprofessional" to some college students). I called my Mom next. BTW, our bedroom was on the second floor so we couldn't just crawl out the window (though, that wouldn't have gotten us anywhere, either). She doesn't know what to do, either. She suggested calling 911, which we decided to use as a last resort. Neither of us had house keys in our bedroom so we couldn't throw them out the window so she could get in.

By this time, I'm fed up. So, I called Shayne (the landlord) and I left him a voicemail yelling at him that if he's not going to fix the problems at our place then he needs to at least answer his stupid phone and that we are locked in our bedroom and we can't get out!!!

Finally, after trying to kick the door down and trying to take the hinges off, we had to get creative. We didn't have any tools in our bedroom and the door jam was on the opposite side of the door so kicking it wouldn't have worked anyway. So, I grabbed a belt and started prying the door moulding off with the tongs of the belt. When I got the moulding off about a centimeter, I then took a candle snuffer (the only other thing in our bedroom made out of hard metal and pried it off the rest of the way. We saw that what had happened was the tongue came out of the door knob contraption and got jammed in the wood plank that it was supposed to click into. (I'm sorry that I don't know the technical terms for all of this, but if you've ever seen how a door works without the moulding on the wall, you should know what I'm talking about.) So Russ jammed his fingers into the crack between the door and the wood plank and pulled the wood plank back from the door while I shoved my fingers into the crack to try to pull the tongue out of the wall. This process took us at least thirty minutes before we were successful.

So, we made it out of our bedroom after an hour and a half of being trapped. I went into work an hour late and took the pieces of our door as evidence. My boss said to me, "Lisa, no one could make up a story that stupid so I know it has to be true." Thanks Boss.