Only me…

I’ll spare you the details of this first admission. And for anyone who actually knows the details about this will tell you that the term – spare you – is really quite an understatement. Next Tuesday, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, I will be having surgery. It’s not dramatic, but it will require going under general anesthesia. This little fact has caused a little anxiety. I mean shit, they give you this pamphlet for you to read that tells you while this procedure is minor – YOU COULD EFFIN DIE. I would be the only person in 200 years to die from this procedure. Whatever. I will just do what I have been doing and pretend that I’m not having surgery.

Ok all that aside, I have been feeling pretty crappy for months – thus the succumbing to the mere idea that this procedure is probably 5 years over-due. It’s amazing how much pain a person will live with, or rather become comfortable with the notion that shit just hurts sometimes and life goes on. Deal. It’s screwed with my sleep patterns a bit and made me just feeling a bit run down to the point that while anxiety provoking in its own right, I secretly and desperately look forward to this fixing my busted body.

WHICH SHOULD BE NOTED THAT IT’S POSSIBLE THAT THIS SURGERY WON’T FIX A DAMN THING.

Super awesome, right? I digress…

We’re done with the surgery pretext. The second pretext (because no story of mine can just be 4-sentences and funny) occurred a couple of years ago. I’ll give you the short of the long… Someone had it out for me, I firmly believe. Two of my tires were slashed in my parking garage. I was getting hang-up phone calls over-and-over again and at all hours of the night. THEN the icing on the cake was one day I came home from work and my peep-hole on my door was almost unscrewed in its entirety. Now, maybe I am just a dumb chick, but I was pretty perplexed as to how this could even happen. Like did I shut my door too hard and forced it out? Cute, I know. It wasn’t until Casey came over and I was telling him I couldn’t get it back in its original resting place, that he tells me that people break into apartments by unscrewing peep-holes and put some kind of object through the opening to pop open the locks on apartment doors. WTF? Ridiculous. So Casey being Casey and after he fixed the peep-hole, fidgets with the hidden top-lock to make it lock back farther than it should making it harder to pop open if someone was in-fact trying to break into my apartment. Sounded like a good idea… until today.

ASIDE: When the peep-hole thing happened, I had decided it was probably time to call the police and report all these occurrences. You know, get it documented and all. I was also hoping to get the number that was calling me repeatedly since the little effer would call me from a blocked number. Which PS (AKA an aside IN an aside) I learned that you can’t block blocked numbers any more. Stupid effin AT&T. And when I called AT&T to find out if they could give me the number this bitch tells me there is ZERO way to figure out what a number is when it’s been blocked. Ok, WHAT? So me being me, I say – So let me get this straight… you mean to tell me if a person is murdered and the last call on their phone right before they are murdered is from a blocked number, you are telling me that the police are shit-out-of -luck on retrieving that number because according to you blocked numbers go into this amazing blocked number abyss? Is THIS what you are telling me? There’s ZERO documentation of blocked numbers? I mean seriously, how the hell do they train you guys? In someone’s garage with kool-aid and purple blankets? To which she then responded with – well, yes there is documentation, but it has to be requested by the police. Which prompted my next call… to the police. At any rate, back to the original aside – the police officer asks me who I’ve pissed off recently and my only response after an uncomfortable pause was – well now, that could be a long list. She was silent and then told me she would document the events and to call back when I had a better idea of who wanted to probably murder me. Bet AT&T would give them the damned blocked number then. Bastards. Whatever.

Ok now to this morning… finally. I actually got amazing sleep last night. First time in awhile. I’m up, dressed and looking better than the ½ dead look I’ve been sporting the last month or so. Today’s going to be a good day. Well, that’s when I should have known that this COULDN’T be true. Yeah… wasn’t. I go over to my front door to leave and what’s this? The top hidden bolt is effin broken. I mean spinning all the way around and not unlocking. Let’s get this straight…

I’M OFFICIALLY LOCKED INSIDE MY APARTMENT.

Which ultimately caused me a little panic. This is obscured, really. I know this. There have been countless lazy Sunday’s where I didn’t leave my apartment once or leave my couch for this matter. But the mere knowledge that I COULD leave my apartment at any time just was. Today, not so much. I’m trapped in here. On the 4th floor. I literally can’t get out. Yeah, semi-freaked out. Fine I’m ridiculous. I’m ready to admit this… it’s who I am. I’m ok with it… you should get ok with it if you’re not. Anyhow, I call down to my apartments to get them to send someone out to let me the eff out. I get the answering service here. DON’T GET ME STARTED ON OUR GHETTO-ASS ANSWERING SERVICE. I’ll leave that at that and spare you from a 3rd aside. They say they will send someone as soon as possible. My anxiety of being trapped had subsided with the knowledge that someone was coming. I call my brother to tell him why I am going to be late to work because I am locked inside my apartment. All he does is laugh. Hysterically. Saying something like – you’d be laughing if it was me. (I probably would have but I was stressing out a bit… it was funny later… kinda).

40-minutes later… things were getting a little heightened. I call back and the apartments are now officially open and they say the answering service requests take 30-minutes to 1½ hours to be answered. I guess me being locked in my apartment wasn’t a crisis for them – WAS FOR ME. So they say they’ll send someone immediately. 5-minutes later, there’s a knock on my door… OMG! Salvation… maintenance guy’s here.

He knocks and I say from inside the apartment – Hey I’m trapped in here.

HIM – ok, open the door to let me in to look at the lock.
ME – no you don’t understand, the lock is broken and I am trapped in here. I can’t unlock the door, thus the problem. (Which I had explained the problem to the answering service AND the idiot girl at the apartment complex.)
HIM – oh, shit. Ok, well sounds like I need a drill. I’ll be right back.

** While that sunk in as I heard his footsteps AWAY from me getting out of the apartment, I knew he didn’t understand that I meant the top hidden bolt. Drill ain’t gonna help dude. Nothing to drill. I’m never getting out of here!
** 5-minutes later.

HIM – ok, stand back from the door.
ME – no, no you don’t understand, it’s the TOP HIDDEN BOLT.
HIM – oh… shit… ok… hang on… shit… ok… let me think about this.

** 30-second pause.

HIM – Ok, do you have a Philips Head?
ME – Yes.
HIM – use it to take the cover off the top bolt completely.

** PS I had already frantically been attempting to do this for the 40-minutes it took him to get to my apartment in the 1st place. It became more frantic as more time passed of me being trapped in my apartment.

ME – I’ve been trying to do that, it’s not coming loose.
HIM – keep trying.

** 2-minutes later, I yank the shit out of it, stripping the screws and sweating a bit.

ME – got it, now what?
HIM – what do you see?
ME – a door and what appears to be what a dead bolt looks like when you remove the cover. (sarcastically… what do I see… you kidding me?)
HIM – what kind of dead bolt is it?
ME – a dead bolt man, I don’t know.
HIM – what does it look like?
ME – an EFFIN dead bolt man… what do you want me to say?
HIM – ok, tell you what… there’s 2 kinds of dead bolts we use here. Look through the peep-hole and I will hold the 1st 1 up. If it looks like yours tell me. If not, we’ll know it’s the 2nd.
ME – it’s not the 1st one.
HIM – ok, take your screw driver and make sure this little piece at the top is all the way to the right.
ME – it IS all the way to the right.
HIM – your right, right? Not my right, right?
ME – dude, right is right. Your right would be left. What are you talking about? It’s all the way to MY right.
HIM – hmmm, shit… well ok… shit… ok… hang on here… ok…

** 30-seconds pass.

HIM – ok, well see if you can stick the screw driver in and push the bolt back manually.
ME – no man, I don’t have one that will work. One is too small and the other is too big.
HIM – shit… ok… hang on… ok… shit…

** 30-seconds pass.

HIM – ok, I’m going to get a crow bar and wedge it in to give you some more room. When I pull it back, see if you can get the bolt out.
ME – ok.

** 2-minutes later.

ME – I’m free!!! On a positive note, I do feel safer given that it’s this difficult to get into the hidden bolt. Do you need me? I’m late to work and need to go.
HIM – nope, I can finish this up and lock it for you.

I bail out and head to work. I get there about 45-minutes late and disheveled. My brother is still laughing and I was getting texted by everyone who knows both my brother and me – saying gay shit like… trapped in your own apartment, loser! Awesome. Thanks Jeremy.

I mean… this is my life. I had to be troubleshot through a peep-hole on how to exit my own residence – a task I have been doing for 3-years now all on my own but now needed assistance. It made me think of when I get old and depend on someone else to do shit for me that I used to be able to do and now can’t… and I’m old and not a priority and they’ll get there when they get there… then use some technical jargon about how to fix something and I’ll be saying back when I was your age, we just had things called iPhones. Traumatic. The whole thing really.

I’m not dramatic. Shut-up.