Wednesday, May 11, 2005, 11:47 a.m.
Last night I got stuck in the bathroom. Like, really stuck. Like, the door absolutely wouldn't open and none of my flatmates were home and I was cold with wet hair and unprepared to spend up to hours stuck in the stupid dirty bathroom of this flat that I am sick and tired of anyway.
So I got myself out.
After realizing that jiggling and pulling and pushing and screaming "Socorro!" (help!) wasn't going to get me out, I started to look around at the tools I had and decided to get my own self out of the bathroom. I first tried to take apart a clothespin. It wouldn't come; the spring was on too tight, but after sort of twisting it and then looking at it, frustrated, it magically came apart, and I tried to use the spring to pry open the door. But no luck. And after pushing and pulling with the door handle a bit more, I decided that no amount of coaxing was going to get it open. I noticed that the bottom screw was a little loose, so I got the idea to just take the whole thing off and see what happens. Luckily, there were only two screws and they weren't Philips-head. So I took the other part of the clothespin (not the spring, the plastic part), and used the edge to try and unscrew them. The bottom one came apart practically immediately, but not the top one. The plastic of the clothespin just kept bending because the screw was metal. I needed something to match its strength - something metal. My eyes fell on my flatmate's razor. "I bet it has the perfect-sized edge inside," I thought, so I tried to undo it. Nothing doing. Just when I thought all hope was lost, the head magically came apart from the stick part (I mean really; it was as if I just willed it and it came apart, same as the clothespin), and I used it to get the door handle off. I briefly congratulated myself, then inspected the doorhandle closely. I scientifically pulled out a random square piece, put it back in, twisted it, and after some grunting and heaving, pulled the door open. Just like that. Fifteen minutes, a clothespin, razor, and grease on my hands later, I was out of the bathroom.
Three days and counting.
Language spot:
Beer
Bière
Bier
Birra
Beeru
Cerveza?
From "Blunders":
In Bermuda in 1975 a man on a motor scooter was killed by a taxi. Exactly a year earlier the same driver in the same taxi, CARRYING THE SAME PASSENGER, had killed the motor-scooter rider's brother, on the same street, riding the same motor scooter.
An American tourist in South America had the decidedly grave misfortune to be attacked by killer bees as he stood on the bank of the Amazon. Seeking refuge, he leaped into the river, and was devoured by piranhas.
