We're Locked In!!! Say What?

If you decide to live in New York City, chances are you will most likely be living in a very old building. And with old buildings, you will probably encounter several repairs that need to be made. Depending on what your management company finds “essential”, they will make appropriate changes, but it’s not unusual for them to, frankly, not care about things you may complain about. Old toilet seats, scratched hardwood floors, and broken blinds are all examples of things they might not care about. Things they do care about though involve safety, like getting locked inside your apartment!

Yep, you might not have known it was possible, but this week my roommate and I learned it is very much a possibility. My roommate came home for the evening and locked our door as usual and the knob that locks the door became unattached from our lock. So instead of being able to switch it back and forth to unlock and lock the door, it just kept spinning around in circles with our door locked!

As in, we were locked in! At 10 o’clock on a weeknight! Oh dear. No worries, we just needed to call our Super right? Well, yes, but it ended up not being as simple as we had hoped. After 3 calls and voicemails to our Super, followed by two messages for our management emergency line, and 10 minutes later we finally got ahold of someone. They couldn’t reach our Super either, but decided to send over a Super from a building near by, by the name of Frankie. Thank goodness for Frankie! By this time it was almost 11 and we were hoping it would be an easy fix so we could get some rest and be able to get out of our apartment the next morning to get to work. Not sure how well a, “ummm, so I’m locked in my apartment and can’t get to work” excuse would go over with my boss.

By almost midnight, our Super had gotten our messages and also arrived on the other side of our door. They tried a bunch of different things to get the door open, including Frankie going on our roof, climbing down our fire escape, and getting our key to try and open it from the other side, but nothing seemed to be getting the job done. Then, out came the drills and hammers to break off our lock. They ended up having to completely drill through our deadbolt to get the door open, but thankfully they were able to make it happen and we could rest easy, along with the rest of our building that could probably hear all of the drilling! Luckily, we still had our top deadbolt and our chain lock too so we still had a way to lock our door before we got a new one installed the next day. So take note burglars, don’t mess with us because we have some sturdy locks on our doors!