Well, since we resurrected the zombie…
Last summer, Ivylad and our son were heading to some dinner event. Since it was a bit of a drive, they were going to spend the night in a hotel and come back in the morning.
I bid them farewell and settled down to do some nice quiet reading on the patio.
After a bit, I decided to go in and get some dinner.
That’s when I realized Ivyboy had locked the patio door to the house. :eek:
In my pajamas, I had to schelp over to the neighbors and borrow their phone and repeatedly try to reach them on the cell phone. When that didn’t work, I called the hotel to leave a message.
Fortunately, they weren’t THAT far down the road, but boy, did they get a stinkeye when they came back home!
Not me but my father, at the house we share. We went to church in separate cars and I said, see you later, I’m going to stop by friends’. “Stop by” turned into many hours of Scrabble and I got home to find my father pacing in the garage trying to keep warm. It was the middle of winter and he had been pacing for…many hours. He had no way to call me and of course I had no idea.
I was so horrified at this that I got a spare key the next morning. It has already been used once after he pulled the door closed assuming I had my keys. :smack:
We have a key hidden behind a combination locked gate (and not under a rock) as well as a key at our retired neighbor’s house. And our outside doors have to be locked with a key.
But when I was in grad school I got locked out of my apartment when the lock broke. Fortunately I had my trusty Swiss Army knife and was able to take apart a window and get in. Not a very secure window fortunately, I didn’t have to break anything.
When I was a child our family of five was living in a rented house for the summer. We all ended up in the basement where the door shut and locked behind us. We had to send my sister up the laundry chute to let us out.
Spam resurrection or no, I’m with iftheresaway - only time I ever locked myself out was when my eldest was just barely a toddler. I was outside, and he was inside, in his crib. It was the early nineties, so no cell phone. I broke a pane out of the back door window and let myself in, retrieved the baby, covered the window with cardboard, and went next door to let my landlady know why the back door glass was temporarily covered with cardboard. Landlady, being a kindly grandmother, immediately dispatched someone to repair the door, and wouldn’t let me pay the extra cost - “I’d have broken a window or a door, too! Insurance can pay for that, 'cause it was an emergency!”
Nowadays, I have a hidey-hole for the spare key. I don’t worry about strangers getting in, because you’d have to brave my dogs to bother anything or anyone at my house. The spare is mostly because the 3-year-old has a habit of accidentally turning the lock when we come outside to play.
Several years ago one summer afternoon, I stepped outside on the porch, pulling the door closed behind me to keep the air conditioning inside the house, completely forgetting that the door automatically locked behind me and I had no key. All the house windows were firmly locked, except for the basement windows. Unfortunately, they were covered by the huge bushes that grew in front of them. I managed to squeeze behind the bushes (getting scratched and muddied in the process), pry the screen from the window, slide through the opening on my belly, and drop about five feet to the floor. (The basement had incredibly high ceilings and windows.)
Thank god the basement door wasn’t locked, but me coming up from the basement completely freaked the hell out of the cats.
This has happened to me twice … and while I was just wearing a towel! Well, it’s called a phakhima, which is a towel-like checkered cloth men wear around their waist at home over here. Our condo unit is on the sixth floor. Right outside our door is the doorway to an internal staircase, on the landing of which are the trash cans. Both times, I popped out to throw out the trash. Our door used to have a hydraulic device that closed the door behind us, and I could have propped it open or even unlocked the doorknob, but the distance was so short that my habit was just to run out, toss in the trash and run back in. Twice, for whatever reason, I was delayed, and the door clicked shut and locked. I had to go down three flights of stairs to the building office. The first time they called the wife, who had to come back from her office to let me in. The second time she was incommunicado, so they called a locksmith. After that, we removed the hydraulic device and I got into the habit of always unlocking the doorknob.
Old post w/ current reply…
Actually, it’s a pretty good place to carry a key. Run the lace thru the keyring hole before you tie them, then tuck the key into your laces so it doesn’t flop around. Because it’s tucked in, even if you shoelace comes untied, the key isn’t falling off.
Not long after we moved into our current house, my husband managed to lock himself out one day while I was at work. He was trying to figure out which neighbor to introduce himself to and ask to use their phone to call me, when he decided to first try getting in through the window in one of the back bedrooms. The house had the original crank-style windows, and he managed to pry a window open with his fingernails and climb in to the bedroom. We had the windows replaced not long after - when the disabled guy can break into the house, it’s time to get new, more secure windows!
We have pretty easy solution if you have a garage. Just hide a key somewhere in the garage and you can open the door by keying in the code.
Just make sure you put the key back for the next time it’s needed.
I locked myself out of my current house once, and timed how long it took to break in. 47 seconds, using a garden tool found beside the steps. I’ve since made some changes.
To update our locked out countermeasures, I installed a keyless entry on the front door. You can set temporary codes for pet sitters or people like that.
It was pretty easy to install. There are a number of different types, including ones controlled by smart phone. Since when I locked myself out I didn’t have my phone, I decided that would be dumb.
I’ve never locked myself out of my house, as far as I can remember. But I’ve got a way better story.
The evening of our wedding day. We’ve left the reception, and we’re about to go into our hotel room. We decide I’m going to do the carrying-her-over-the-threshold bit. So I unlock the door to the room, set the keys down inside, pick her up and have her nicely arranged in my arms to carry her in…
…and the door swings shut. Locked, of course.
Fortunately, the front desk and an extra room key were just an elevator ride away, but we still crack up when we remember that part of our wedding day.
I have the same sort. Basic Schlage electronic combo lock from Home Depot.
Installs in place of a conventional doorknob or deadbolt depending on the model. And installs the same way, so takes just a couple screws and a few minutes to pull the conventional deadbolt or knob set and install the electronic keypad unit.
Another vote that having self-locking exterior doors is simply a decision to become locked out. The only question is when and how cold it’ll be that day. I’ve not had self-locking doors on a residence since childhood.
ETA: And yes IMO the thread revival was pure spam to some guy’s blog.
My husband fairly recently bought a new Honda (to replace his soon-to-be-defunct Dodge), which came with the spiffy new keyless ignition deal.
Did you know those keyless ignitions have an effective functional distance of about 15 - 20 feet?
A few weeks ago, we went out to run some errands, got into the car, pushed the button to turn it on, got to the store, turned the car off - and then when we went to get back into the car to continue erranding, realized it wouldn’t start. Because the keys were still peacefully located in the Basket Where We Chuck Car Keys in the hallway of our house. Which is evidently close enough to the garage to allow us to start the goddamn car and drive away. Did you know cars with keyless ignitions keep running totally normally until you turn them off? They do! No warning light or anything when they get out of range of the actual key.
Even more fun, because we were in his car, my car keys (with the house keys attached) were also in the Basket Where We Chuck Car Keys. Safely locked in our house with my husband’s keys.
My husband had to take an Uber back to the house (with the garage door opener from his car in hand so he could get in the goddamn house) to pick up his car keys so we could drive the car home. Because we’d managed to drive away from the house without the car keys. I’m glad we were just going to the grocery store and not - for example - to my parents’ house three hours away.
My brother did sorta the opposite thing. Drove his car to the airport, parked, got distracted and got out of the car with the remote fob thingy in hand, locked the doors and went to work. Unknowingly leaving the engine running since he never pushed the “stop” button.
He came back three days later & his car wouldn’t start. It would crank just great, but wouldn’t light off or even cough. He eventually noticed the gas gauge was below E and had been a half-tank when he left home. :smack:
