Opening Locked Doors for Dummies!

So there are many things I am good at, many things I am bad at. I mean, it’s the same with everyone. For example, I am good at saying my name, opening my eyes, and failing at tennis. I am bad at tennis, bad at sports, and bad at opening doors.

 

What did you say? Opening doors, you say? Why, that’s a simple everyday task!

Well, unfortunately, when I was born, Dear old God deprived me of such supposedly easy everyday tasks. For example, very often, I lack common sense. So in a sense (XD it’s a PUN I just realized), for me, it’s not common at all.

And I’m not good at noticing things unless you actually say it really obviously. I can see, hear, taste, smell, and feel, but I’m not too good at any of those either. (Bad eyesight, bad hearing, don’t know about taste and smell and feel, but pretty sure they’re defected in some way or another.)

And besides common sense, I lack the ability to open doors.

Of course, I can open them. It’s just the matter of unlocking them. With those keys, jingling on the keychain, the one you stick into the keyhole and then twist it to unlock the door?

Well, I’m not too good at it.

I mean, just today, I was locked out of my own house even though I had the key in my hand.

Do you want to hear my pathetic story?

Hear, hear.

 

So it’s a nice and sunny day.

No.

It’s actually pretty cloudy, and I’m coming home from school, (got off the bus and stuff), said good-bye to my friend-neighbor whom I walk home with, and I go to the door.

It’s a normal day for me, supposedly, because (1) I’m still short, (2) I am still alive, and (3) there are no sudden atrophies in my health.

So I had nothing under suspicion, not even the squirrel that chitter-chattered as it scrambled up the tree nearby.

Then, I reached the door of my house. The looming, big, green door.

You see, our door is not any ordinary door. Like me, it has some flaws and imperfections. For example, the screen door will not shut. In fact, if you live in my house, like I do, after you shut the screen door, within about three minutes, you hear that irritating CREEEEEEEEEAAK CREEEEAAAAAAAK coming from right outside again. (Recently my dad fixed it, so now it never opens properly—it shuts closed even if you prop it open.)

Then, for the real door (not saying the screen door is fake, but just as a figure of speech). Gawd. So the doorknob thing isn’t a round-ish sort of circle, like most doors. Ours is like a handle sort of thing.

^ Like that.

So anyhow, we have ANOTHER lock on TOP of that.

So anyhow, the handle of our door (shown in the picture above), broke a while ago. And then, one fateful day (the phrase comes from Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie by Jordan Sonnenblick), while we were hurriedly rushing our reluctant selves out of the house, the handle just came loose and got ripped right out of the door.

…Which was pretty shocking, considering we were (probably) pretty late to wherever we were supposed to be getting to.

SO ANYWAYS, our father eventually “fixed” it (just a week ago it came out again, but now we’ve all just given up), and now the little pushy thingy that goes in and out as you turn the handle—the small metal chunk thingy that clicks the door closed and keeps it closed—you know that, situated at the edge of the door, the thingy protruding out of the rectangle of the door? Well, it stayed inside the hole thing. I guess it’s gone through a lot in its life, and decided that ‘that’s it,’ and it would never expose itself to the outside world once again.

SO now, we can open our door just by pulling the door handle (no need to turn the knob and then pull the door—just pull with no turn). Which, sometimes, the handle comes off just as the door creaks open.

AND THEN. I’m not even done.

The Doorbell. Geez, someone messed with that, because our doorbell is cracked. It is CRACKED. Like, someone got real angry and decided to put it out on a poor little doorbell, so that the plastic covering that hides the little LED light is out. It’s just cracked and open. So now, friendly neighbors trying to be social are awkwardly knocking on the door instead of pressing the cracked, dilapidated, neglected doorbell.

Oh, well.

La boca de mi casa es muy viejo y roto.

Well, you can call it the mouth.

Anyhow. We have a very messed up front-of-the-house.

ANYWAYS.

Back to the main story. I reached the welcoming entrance to my cozy home and pushed the door to open it (at this time, we’re so used to the broken door that we don’t even think about turning the handle, we just push the door in and it opens).

It didn’t open. Which meant—the door was locked. Of course the lock on the doorknob/door-handle itself was broken—everything about that was broken, but the lock above that (remember, we have two locks, one on the doorknob and one above it) was locked. It’s our only  means of security.

So I flipped my backpack onto my tummy and opened the front pocket to get the key.

Whew, it’s there.

Then, unclipping the key from the bag, I stuffed it into the key-hole in attempts to unlock the door.

It didn’t open.

So there I was, standing pathetically at my OWN FRONT DOOR, with the KEY TO THE DOOR, TURNING THE KEY, and I STILL COULDN’T open the darn DOOR.

You see, as much as I twisted the key this direction and that, it just DID NOT BUDGE.

So I got really scared, and I wondered if I should stay at a friend/neighbor’s house—but what could I say? “I’m sorry, I can’t seem to get into my own house even though I have the key.”

So I called my mom, who said she’d be coming in five minutes.

Then, returning to the door-unlocking business, I continued to bite my tongue off trying to get the key to UNLOCK THE STUPIT DOOR.

I felt like a total idiot.

Please excuse the use of the word, but I really did. I mean, really. Who can’t open a door?

Well, apparently, me.