My Imbecility: An Endess Series

Sometimes I don't really know how I make it through the day.  Here's a picture of an enemy that proved to be way too clever for me to outwit.  Yes, it's a door.  Specifically, it's the door to my comfortable room in my nice hotel in the old city area of San'a. As you might be able to tell from the picture, it doesn't have a lock, at least on the inside.  To open it you had to use one of those great big old keys (which I love) that was so large that you really had to leave it at the front desk when you left (no swipe cards there).  So, locking it from the outside was easily done.  However, what about on the inside?  Actually, that was deceptively easy.  The only lock was the hook, much as you'd find on a screen door back in the States.  That just didn't seem like enough security to me, so I convinced myself that there must be more to it than that.  So when I checked in on Thursday evening I started tinkering with the lock (keeping in mind that there was no place to slide the key in on the inside of the door) when suddenly the deadbolt slipped into place.  Huzzah!  That was easily done, and it wasn't until the next morning that I realized that since the deadbolt was in place, and there was no keyhole on the inside of the door, I was now trapped.  Not almost trapped or essentially trapped, but completely trapped.  It was early on a Friday morning, which meant that there was no one at the front desk when I called for help.  Obviously, this was after getting over my fear of being branded, quite correctly, as an idiot, by trying everything I could possibly imagine to get the door open, including carving at the old, soft wood with a bottle opener that I found on the mini-fridge.  Oddly, the bottle opener was shaped like a Christmas tree, but that's another story.  Oh, and the fact that other folks had apparently tried the same carving approach gave me some solace.  And now I began to panic a bit; not that I was going to die there, but rather that after going through all the trouble of getting a Yemeni visa and planning my trip there that I was going to waste half a day trapped in my hotel room.  Naturally, in that situation, the best approach is to do something that Americans are very good at - get loud and smashy-smashy, and luckily someone heard me (which was pretty fortunate because there weren't that many people in the hotel, but amazingly one of them was on my floor).  I heard an Australian voice calling from the other side of the door (keeping in mind that was around 6:00 in the morning on a Friday) asking me if I needed help.  More on my rescuer later.  Very quickly he had trotted downstairs, rallied someone at the front desk (from a deep sleep, doubtless), and I was freed.  Happily, after that clumsy beginning, the rest of the day was wonderful.

One of the many objects in the world that is smarter than me.