When One Door Closes, It Stays Closed: A Sequel

My sister is coming to visit me in Deutschland! This is the good news. The bad news is that her first flight got cancelled, so she’s getting here a little later than originally planned.

Last night I was up all night to get lucky, and also to listen to the play-by-play of her lack-of-flying adventure. She was supposed to leave at 6:36 pm Central time, but then got driven around the runway in a fancy airplane car for several hours until finally the airline gave up on attempting this wacky concept known as flying and called it quits. And since Germany is 7 hours ahead of Central time, you can do the math to figure out how late I stayed up.

This morning, once I roused myself from a delightful dream of bald friends and Chuck-E-Cheese parties, I got a text from my roommate telling me that she had thoughtfully washed some sheets for my sister’s makeshift bed. She wanted to make sure they were ready in time, so she asked me to put them in the dryer. This is all fine and dandy, except that the washer and dryer are down in the bowels of the building. So I put some pants on, grabbed the laundry card, walked out the front door, and began the Great Laundry Adventure of 2013.

Immediately after I closed the front door, I remembered that duh, you have to have keys to get into any place in the apartment building, including your own apartment. Especially your own apartment, which for some reason has a door knob that is just there for looks and not to serve any really useful function other than to stare indifferently at you in your hour of deepest despair.

Armed only with my laundry card and a strong pair of boots that were made for stomping, I planned my attack on the door. Even though the door knob had been rather snobbish to me, I decided that kicking it off the door would probably not work, and would possibly only further complicate the already tense diplomatic relations between America and German Doors.

So instead I first made 1000% sure that the fixed door knob didn’t actually have a secret twisting capability, pushed on it for a good 15 seconds in an attempt to force it open with my brute strength, and then gave up and made like a Jehovah’s Witness by knocking on all the doors in the building. The second one opened up with a relatively small amount of banging and clanging on my part, and inside a nice little lady with a baby let me use her computer in a futile attempt to find my roommate’s phone number. That was a challenge in itself, because have you tried using a German keyboard lately? The Y and Z keys are switched, the @ is on the Q, and I still don’t know what key combinations you have to push to get the @ to appear.

After that plan failed, she suggested I visit the apartment management’s office across the courtyard. So I made my way across the wintry courtyard in my why-yes-I-just-woke-up-and-locked-myself-out-of-my-apartment-thank-you-for-noticing attire, circled half of the building’s perimeter before realizing I had already passed the entrance door, then stumbled into the front office.

Inside the management office, I explained my pathetic situation to the kind woman at the reception desk, and she gave me my one free phone call before incarceration. I decided to call my roommate instead of my lawyer to come bail me out of my reverse imprisonment dilemma, and she graciously returned to the apartment and unlocked the dreaded door for me.

Thus continues the Saga of Molly’s Complete Ineptitude for Living in a Foreign Country.

Now I just have to figure out how to convert my roommate’s time lost at work into pounds of chocolate that I can buy for her.

Look at the door knob of doom. Look at how self-satisfied it looks with its inability to twist, turn, or be even remotely helpful in times of real need.