Recently, the gas to the house here was turned off, I hadn't realized that the gas and other utilities were run by separate companies. The water heater, therefore, had been off for about a week when I decided to turn it back on on saturday after taking a cold shower that was colder than I had wanted. I was still in a towel, and thought, I'll just run outside to the water heater and light it real quick. Either through habit or pure stupidity, I pulled the door shut behind me. After lighting the pilot, I walked back to the door to find it locked. The front door too. Oops. I thought that maybe a window might be unlocked, so I tried all of those as well. I even used a ladder that was around the side of the house to try the higher windows. In a towel. I found a piece of baling wire and thought that I might be able to break into the house the way that I used to break into the loft. After about 20 minutes of trying and imagining increasingly MacGuyveresque methods of entering, I gave up and had to have the internal debate: do I break one of the small windows and go inside, or do I go ask the neighbor, who I don't know, to borrow her phone? I say her because the only person that I met that lived in the house next to mine is an older woman who doesn't speak English. I went as far as finding a suitable rock before I thought better of it.
Steeling myself for further embarrassment, especially that I don't know the word for 'locksmith' in Spanish, I knocked on the door. To my tiny relief, a guy answered, weirdly also not wearing a shirt. I received a look that is generally reserved for homeless people with particularly obtrusive smells. He warily lent me his phone from behind the screen door, I suppose wanting to keep some sort of barrier between himself and the weirdo. He didn't have a phone book, so I called Rachel, who looked up locksmith numbers, then the landlady's number. When the landlady didn't answer, I made an appointment with a locksmith, who planned to charge me $50 for the privilege of reentry to my house.
I sat on the porch in a shell chair seat that I have yet to bring inside and contemplated whether or not I had ever been, up to that moment, equally embarrassed. After about 10 minutes, but before I had come to a concrete conclusion, the neighbor told me that the landlady had called back and was on her way over. I asked to borrow his phone to call off the locksmith, and while I was on the phone with 'Pop-a-Lock,' the landlady showed up. I had not informed her in the voicemail that I left of my betowelled condition. She let out a loud bark of laughter when she spotted me, and continued to chuckle as she unlocked the front door.
When I got inside, I was able to finish my earlier contemplation: That was definitely the most embarrassing experience of my entire life.
LOLOLOLOLOLOL!
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