Remember this fiasco back in January when I accidentally locked myself out of the house? My former property manager (Serbian, I think?) saved my hide, along with my neighbour who drove me to fetch the key from the office in the middle of winter and lent me a coat so I wouldn’t freeze that night.

Fast forward to today: my doorbell rang and I ran down to fetch Martin, a houseguest from the UK, who’d TTC’ed and biked over from his previous host’s place on the other side of town. In my haste, the door closed behind me and I hadn’t put the keys in my pocket like I usually do. I had this sinking feeling…

… and I turned immediately around and tried the door knob. LOCKED!!!

I locked myself out of my suite AGAIN! (Yes, I’m going to get the blimmin’ key copied and stored somewhere in case this happens again.)

Martin was just going to drop his stuff off and head out again, except we were totally stranded. I had an idea: if maybe Martin was crazy brave enough to climb the fire escape and shimmy down the roof, he could push a screen in from one of the two open windows at the front of the house and climb in through the window. Except the roof is STEEP. I mean, really steep, and I’m on the top (third) floor — it’s a helluva long way down if he slipped. All of my other windows aren’t reachable without a fireman’s ladder. Martin made it up the fire escape, got on the roof, assessed the situation, and shook his head.

I didn’t want to entertain any possibility of a Brit splattered all over the driveway or having to explain this to his family or the authorities, so I went next door to the neighbours’ to see if they had any lock-picking implements. There I found only a tradesman who was working on their renovations, and I asked him if he could pick a lock. You know, because it’s completely normal to just walk randomly into people’s homes and make that sort of request.

I don’t even know what sort of tradesman he was — he may have been just a drywaller. But he came up to my door and had a go at the lock, without success. He even declared, after a number of tries, that picking it would be impossible. He eventually returned to work.

Martin had another look at the roof and I was losing confidence in that as a viable plan, so I asked the Albanian tradesman to borrow his phone to call a locksmith, but nobody had a phone book (remember those?) and I didn’t want to phone directory assistance because that would be an additional charge on his phone. At some point he had a bright idea, because he grabbed another set of tools, walked back up to my apartment door, and ——- (let’s just pretend I told you how he did it*) —— got the door open! Brilliant!

I tried to tell him that he saved me a lot of time and money, but he wouldn’t let me pay him, so I had to run over to the neighbour’s house and stick some cash in his pocket while he was protesting with tools in his hand and then run home again.

Martin said I was really lucky, and I sure am! So that’s the story of how an Albanian went out of his way to save my sorry hide and considered it all in a day’s work.

* Because I really don’t want anyone to get ideas about how to break into people’s homes… without appearing to have broken into people’s homes, you know?