As the doorknob turns

I don't spend all my time locking myself in and out of things. Really.

If you were to read the post I wrote about locking myself in elevators and out of my house, you might be inclined to disagree, but honestly, it's not as bad as it sounds. Out of the 8,700-odd days that I've been alive, I've locked myself out of the house a handful of times and in elevators twice. And I've never locked my keys in my car, so that's not bad. The balance of days where I remain free of entrapment problems far outweigh the days where I end up in trouble.

Having said that, though, I'll now relate another story where I magically locked myself out of my bedroom...

Naturally.

I live in a ghetto little house with four other girls. One day while I was at work I got a text from one of these girls saying simply, "Just so you know, I got a cat." My first reaction was this: "Oh yay! A cat! I've been wanting a cat since I moved in!" My second reaction was this: "Wait...the landlord said no pets... Oh well." And my third reaction was this: "Hold on...I've got a fish! In a bowl! With no lid! Oh no!"

(Surely when the landlord said, "No pets," he didn't mean fish, right? That's the assumption I've been going off of for three-ish years.)

The fish is named Lee Carter and he technically isn't mine. He belongs to my roommate, but I've been fish-sitting him for ages now. He's survived being ogled by multiple cats, cleaning checks, and two deaths. He's named after Lee Carter (or, with the appropriate English accent: Lee Cah-tah) from this movie:

Anyway. Tangent...

So I got home that night and promptly closed my bedroom door. The cat proved to be pretty stupid by nature, and it took him about three days and numerous visits to my bedroom before he realized I was keeping his own private sushi stash swimming around on my desk. After that, I knew that Lee Carter's home would have to undergo an upgrade (i.e. a big boy tank with a lid).

The next morning I got up and prepared to go to work. In order to keep the cat out of my room while I spent eight hours sitting at my desk downtown, I carefully closed the door, putting my heavy makeup box as close against it as I could get. My doorknob hadn't worked properly since I moved into my ghetto house in November, so without something leaning against it, the cat could simply walk into it and it would open. Feeling pleased with my solution, I pulled my slightly smashed hand out of the tiny space left between my makeup box and the door jamb and went to work.

Hours later I returned home to find that my mysterious roommate (who appears once in a blue moon, takes a shower, and then vanishes again) had been home. She had indeed taken a shower and then subsequently closed all the doors to our little hallway, making the humidity pile up (does humidity pile up?) until the air had the same consistency as a sauna. (Does air have consistency?) (Meh. Whatevs.)

Anyway, so after airing out the hallway I walked up to my room and grabbed the doorknob to open the door. However, when I pushed, nothing happened. I tried again. Still nothing. I kept trying over and over, but the door still didn't budge.

Now, none of this made any sense. The door should have just opened with a push like it always did. It didn't have a lock, so that couldn't have been the problem. The knob turned just fine, too. And my makeup box was not that heavy. The only thing I could think of that might cause this problem was the humidity. Humidity can make doors swell, so I diagnosed the door problem and settled down in the living room to wait until the door returned to its normal size.

Two hours...three hours...four hours later, I was still sitting in the living room and I was fresh out of patience. After warning my roommate downstairs that she would soon be hearing some odd banging noises from above her room, I began attempting to force my door open.

As per a suggestion from my dad, I sprayed the door with Pam. (Yeah, seriously.) It made the door greasy, but it refused to budge. Grasping the doorknob with one hand, I threw myself against the door over and over, resulting in nothing more than tiny little jewel-shaped bruises on my bum from the jewels on my pants pockets. So then (again, from my dad) I got a chair and ran down the hall, pushing it into the door like a battering ram. The door still didn't move.

Open up, you dang door!

I couldn't go through the window because it only opened about three inches on a crank system, so that was out. I used a wedge to try to force the door away from the doorjamb. No dice. I tried to see if the doorknob was the real problem using a credit card. It slid all the way through but did nothing else. My mom suggested blasting the door with a blow dryer in case humidity really was the problem, but the blow dryer was in the bedroom... I thought about pulling the hinges out, but they were on the inside of the door too, so that was also a no-go from the start. I sat down on the floor and kicked against the door. That only managed to slide my jewel-shaped bruises backward on my Pam-y floor.

In the end, I gave up. I surrendered to the inevitable and decided to sleep on the couch. Setting the alarm on my nearly-dead phone (the charger was also in the bedroom...) I prayed that I would wake up in time to make it to my 7 a.m. work shift and then spent the night's remaining 3 hours or so turning on the space heater (again, to hopefully fix the door swelling — if that really was the problem) whenever the power strip it was connected to would surge and flip off and waking up to see if it was time to go to work.

The next morning I went to Walmart to buy a new shirt (as my clothes were locked in the bedroom — along with everything else) and then called my landlord from work. He came to fix the problem, which turned out to be, naturally, the doorknob.

It randomly decided to start working — even though it had never worked before — and then went the extra mile by deciding to break. Stupid doorknob.

On the bright side (because there's always a bright side), there was absolutely no way the dumb cat was going to break in there and eat my fish. Lee Carter had never been so safe in his entire life.