On the Bright Side, I Now Know the Word for "Locksmith"

My faith in the French has been restored.

I was coming home from a friend's party around 1:30 last night, humming and in high spirits because I'd had a great time, and, reaching the door to my building, performed the usual pat-check for confirmation that my keys were where they were supposed to be. I didn't hear the familiar jingle, but wasn't particularly worried because I often have false alarms and was determined not to freak out over nothing. I sang Sylvie Lewis to myself as I entered the code to the door and thought about how terrible it would be if I really didn't have my keys. I was sure I did. Unfortunately, my certainty counted for nothing and "wouldn't it suck if..." quickly turned into "oh no, maybe..." and then "well, damn." I was locked out.

Normally, this wouldn't have been a big problem since I have a roommate, Adil, who is usually around at night to let stupid girls back in. This weekend, however, he went home to Mulhouse (near Switzerland and Germany) to celebrate Ramadan with his family and wouldn't be back until Monday. I called him, very late, to find out if there was a spare key. There was! ...with his brother in Mulhouse.

Damn.

At this point, I was surprisingly calm and completely convinced that I would be able to find a way in that night, even though Adil was already suggesting places to stay for the weekend. My mind flew to the window. The courtyard! Surely I could scale the various patios and ledges and climb in! All I needed to do was figure out how to get to the courtyard, but that couldn't be very hard. It turns out it was much harder than it looked, especially since the lights on the interior of the building are on timers and kept turning themselves off every 2 minutes. After about 10 minutes of creeping through the darkness and cautiously climbing winding staircases of doom, I determined that the courtyard outside my window actually belongs to another building and gave up.

There was, however, another courtyard (one that I could locate) with "access" to my roommate's open window. Unfortunately, this courtyard has significantly fewer climbable ledges than the other and it didn't take me long to realize that, even without my shoes, it was impossible to climb.

Luckily, by that time, I already had another plan. Thanks to the best of all possible boyfriends, I had a list of phone numbers for locksmiths in the area that I could call. For some reason, I either couldn't figure out how to use my phone, or the phone just wouldn't work, so I went next door to a hotel in order to beg to use theirs. I had to explain, in French, my sob story to the desk attendant, Arthuro (I'm pretty sure), who informed me that hiring a locksmith at 2:00 am on a Friday night could cost as much as 350 euros! As usual, my stinginess overruled my desperation, and I decided to try other solutions first. So, together, Arthuro and I borrowed a ladder from the basement of the hotel and carried it into my apartment building to see if we could reach the window. It was about a story too short, but I was pretty sure I could make it if I took off my shoes. Arthuro, however, put his foot down and refused to let me try. We went back to the hotel and he gave me the phone number of his friend, a man he said could climb up and break the window to let me in. I was, obviously, a little horrified at the suggestion of breaking and entering (and a little insulted that he would let someone else make the climb), but he assured me that since the window was already open, it would really only be entering. I was still uneasy, but was spared having to act since it was still 2 in the morning and his climber friend wouldn't be available until the next day. At this point, I had decided that it would just be easier (and cheaper) to wait until morning to do anything. I called up my new friend Giulia, whose party I had left only an hour earlier, and asked to spend the night. Arthuro gave me his phone number in case anything went wrong in the meantime.

I slept like a baby at Giulia's. Her apartment/house had an extra bedroom with a really comfy and warm bed that I fell asleep in almost immediately. I had nice dreams about getting into my apartment, and I woke up early and ready to try again.

After looking up several locksmiths in the phonebook, I set off on foot to visit their offices. I was still wearing my party clothes from the night before and felt kind of silly and in pain running around the streets in heels at 9:30 in the morning. Just as it began to drizzle, I got to the locksmith's, but the office was closed! Normally this is when I would have cried, but for some reason I was either very dazed or very confident throughout the entire ordeal and just kind of accepted it with a shrug and an "oh, well." As I was heading toward the subway, I passed another locksmith and tried the door. Also locked. BUT, an employee down the street saw me trying to get in and escorted me to the off-hours office so that I could talk to the manager. My French was not nearly at the level it was when I was explaining everything to Arthuro the night before and I was fairly certain that the boss was going to get fed up with me and send me away, but I must have managed to convey my desperation somehow, because he was quite nice and set me up for an appointment. Moreover, instead of charging me the standard company rate (80 euros plus 15% commission on a Saturday), he just told me to work it out with the worker who came to open the door. The worker, himself, just told me to pay "what I could." I think my look of horror at the mention of 80 euros must have really had an effect. In the end, I paid 30 euros, which was less than what I would have been willing to pay and more than the 12 euro comission that the worker would have made for doing the same job. So, I think everyone won in the end...except the company, which was just nice.

Anyway, I'm just really happy to be back in my apartment and really, unbelievably grateful to all of the people who were willing to help a perfect stranger. I really can't believe what some of them went through just to be nice and helpful. I think that, at the very least, I need to send Arthuro some sort of thank-you basket!