Let Us In, Let Us In! Let Us Out, Let Us Out!

Our front door broke today. It wouldn't open at all. After some inspection, it was deduced that it wasn't so much the door that was broken but the deadbolt. It's wouldn't un-bolt. We were locked in.

Drek got out his power tools and set about taking apart the hinges. He then went around to the out side and strategically hit the door until it came off its frame.

"Hey!" I said. "Remember that time, in our first apartment, where I came home from work and our front door was missing? Because our landlord just took off with it for a few hours?"

Drek frowned. "No."  He examined the deadbolt and declared it broken beyond repair."Remember that one time we had to break down a door to free my mom from the not-yet-opened Mexican hospital we were squatting in?"

"Oh yeah!" I laughed.  "Good times."

Drek went to the hardware store to get a new lock while I stood guard against coyotes or alligators or whatever else could just wander in to our house on account of our no-door policy. He came back and returned the front door to its hinges and frame.

Of the two stories, I've just told all there was to the first one, but the latter is way better:

When Drek and I were dating his family decided to do a service project down in Mexico over Christmas break because they are awesome like that. Realizing these were my kind of people, I volunteered to go along. The day after Christmas we drove across the border and found ourselves in a very poor area of a Mexican city. The Catholic Padre who was our contact in Mexico said we would be spending the night in an under-construction building that would eventually be a hospital.  The building was almost completed: The walls and floors and roof had all been finished, there was even tile in some parts of the building.

To this day, I don't know if we were "approved" to be there. I know the Padre said he was going to lock us in "for our protection" and he would be back to free us in the morning. There was nothing official about the situation. We were just locked in a building and told to stay there until morning, so Drek's family laid their sleeping bags out on the concrete floor and Drek's mom went into a room to change into her pajamas, closing the door behind her.

The door closed a little too well and, like our front door, then refused to open back up. Drek's mom for several minutes to open it before calling for help. The whole family then tried to open it. Drek's dad and brothers tried to break the door down by running up to it and throwing themselves against it, but the door was surprisingly solid. Drek's dad broke out the power tools we brought with us and removed the door handle, but that didn't open the door. It wasn't a broken lock, the door itself was broken.

I already gave away the ending so this story isn't very suspenseful. Needless to say we did not just leave her to rot in a foreign country.  The next suggestion was that we take the door off its hinges, but the hinges were on the other side of the door. We tied the power drill to an extension cord and swung it out the window to where Drek's mom could catch it. She then took the door off its hinges and the door FINALLY opened. Of course, we fixed the whole thing before leaving the next day.

And that is all the stories I have about doors.