My husband, Steve, and I are heading up north to visit my brother- and sister-in-law and our nephew. In lieu of anything informational, I thought I'd re-post a highly entertaining post Steve wrote back in February of 2012. (It actually ranked one of our most popular posts!)
For our newer readers who don't know Steve, he was coached here from 2010-2014 until he went to go work on Concentric Brain (also owned by Sarah Walls, SAPT's founder and president).
If you need a laugh today, and who doesn't on a Friday?, today's post will not disappoint!
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This past Wednesday was looking to be a particularly delightful morning for me. I was ahead of schedule with my SAPT-related tasks (something that occurs once in a blue moon), and, also, Wednesday holds my shortest workout of my weekly training schedule. As such, I had a bit of extra time at my disposal.
Given this, I thought it'd be a great opportunity to get a full night's rest, do the laundry (something really vexes me about having to do it during the weekend), write a few programs for the SAPT athletes, answer some emails, then top it off by heading to the local coffee shop to satisfy my palate with a delicious brew while writing my next article for an online publication. I'd then have plenty of time to get in my training session before the athletes showed up to SAPT for the afternoon appointments.
Sweet. It was going to be a solid morning.
I sleep in until 7:30am, and eventually head into the living room at 7:45, laundry basket in hand. However, upon entering the room, I immediately notice three things:
1) Sheik, our (indoor) cat, is nowhere to be seen. 2) The door to our apartment is ajar. 3) There's a faint meowing sound in the distance.
My wife left at 7:30 to handle the morning appointments at SAPT, so it was pretty clear what happened: The door didn't shut all the way, and Sheik, being a cat, wanted to see what lay out in the mysterious void beyond the apartment walls. She clearly became lost, and was now fearful and meowing like crazy.
My superhero instincts kick in.
Without thinking about anything else, I commando roll out of the apartment and dart down the stairwell to find poor Sheik huddled in a ball in the middle of the concrete floor looking around like a....well, like a frightened animal. I pick her up, comfort her and tell her that everything will be O.K., and head back up the stairs, thinking about how much I can't wait to tell my wife of how I saved the day by rescuing our precious little kitty.
That is, until I climb back up to the third story to find that our apartment door is locked.
Now, if the story stopped here, I wouldn't be wasting valuable cyberspace bandwidth to tell this story on the interwebz. After all, practically everyone has locked themselves out of their home at one point or another.
Not THAT big a deal, right?
Well, there are six additional details that make this situation particularly frustrating for me:
1. Remember how I told you that, "without thinking about anything else," I rolled out of our apartment to rescue our cat? Yeah, well, the clothes on my back was one of those things I forgot to consider. Or rather, the LACK of clothing on my back. Yes, I am locked outside my apartment in my little boy shorts that I slept in.
2. It's wintertime. So not only am I nearly naked in a public space, but it is 35 degrees outside.
3. Kelsey is gone. So there's no one inside to let me in.
4. My cell phone is inside the apartment. So calling for aid quickly gets crossed off the #1 spot on my list of options for survival.
5. I have an indoor cat stuck with me, outside. 'Nuff said there.
6. My bowels are screaming LIKE CRAZY to use a bathroom. Remember how I mentioned last week that my life has been radically altered for the better because of my recent supplementation with Metamucil? Yeah, well, one of the things about Metamucil is that it works. VERY WELL. Once that puppy kicks in your system, you better hope you have a bathroom nearby.I do not. The nearest restroom is at least a quarter mile away, in the middle of a shopping center.
Best. Morning. Ever.
Next I run through some other possible solutions. One of my neighbors can help me, right? Yes, sure they can. I tell Sheik to stay put by our door, and I begin to knock on neighboring doors to see if someone may have a phone - along with the number for maintenance - to help me out. Yes, I realize it's 7:45 in the morning, so I knock softly. Don't really want to piss anyone off, especially considering that if and when they open their door early in the morning, the first thing they'll find is a nearly naked man on their doorstop.
No one answers, which I'm not particular angry about (after all, how I am I supposed to explain things to them???). No luck there.
The leasing office of my apartment complex doesn't open until 9am, so it looks like I'm going to have to wait it out until I can go get a spare key. I slide down the brick wall, take a seat on the cold tile, and try to get into the most comfortable position one can only do when it's cold out and they don't have any clothes. As Sheik climbs into my lap, I tell her, "Okay, Sheik, here we are." Just seventy minutes to sit here and wait. And hope I don't explode."
Throughout the next seventy minutes I do two things:
1) I try to think of how, once 9:00am arrives, I can walk the quarter mile - shoeless and nearly clothless - over to the leasing office and explain the situation to them, hoping they'll grant me amnesty before a police officer tackles me and drags me off to prison for indecent exposure.
2) I do that weird and awkward wiggle-and-waddle-hunched-over walk people do when they're about to destroy the back of their pants. I wonder how long it's going to take before I run outside and experience, first hand, what the old adage "desperate times call for desperate measures" really means.
Another problem is, I have no watch on me. So I have to guess when it's 8:50am to begin my journey over to the office. I don't want to be out in the open any longer than I have to be.
So I continue to alternate between sitting and standing, replaying the Sliding Filament Theory (Note from Kelsey: this is how nerdy your strength coaches are.) in my head, doing my best to remember the reaction sequence of Glycolysis, and trying to recite Prilepin's Chart by memory. Or, maybe, I just sit there, attempting to warm the tile beneath me, counting the number of bricks on the walls. I can't remember which.
And don't worry, I'll spare you the details of that whole "Metamucil thing" I alluded to earlier. All I'll say is that it was not pleasant.
Here's where things get even more interesting.
At what I can only guess has been the 1-hour mark, I hear a chain jingle behind the door across from me. I immediately perk up, simultaneously filled with both excitement and anxiety as I don't know who's going to walk out from behind the door.
The door swings open, and out walks a professional-looking woman who must be in her low thirties, innocently on her way to work. Upon seeing me, she quickly gasps, widens here eyes, freezes still, and nearly drops her bags at the site of a strange, practically-naked man sitting in the cold abyss in front of her. Here's how the conversation goes down:
Me: (trying to explain as quickly as possible that I'm not some sort of Dionysian rapist) Hiii, umm, I know this looks really weird, but I locked myself out of my apartment over an hour ago trying to rescue my cat. *fervently pointing to cat*
Lady: ......
Me: I'm sorry, I know this looks really sketchy, and I hate to bug you as you leave for work, but is there ANY way I might be able to borrow a phone? *tries to hide under desk, but there's no desk to hide under*
Lady: Oh, sure....sorry, you startled me, that's all. Yeah, here you go. *sets bags down and stands as far from me as possible as she hands me her phone*
Me: Thank you SO much, I really do appreciate it. You don't happen to have the number for maintenance, do you?
Lady: Yeah, I do actually. They don't open until 9:00 though (it's 8:45 at this point), but you can leave them a message.
Me: *begins dialing*
Lady: Hey, uh, I need to get to work, but can I get you a blanket or anything?
Me: Oh, wow, thanks so much, but I'll be okay I think. I don't really want to bother you any more than I already have.
Lady: No really, it's not a problem, it's pretty cold outside, after all. *Begins rummaging through her purse to get her keys*
Lady:.........
............................
Lady: OMG. My......my keys.......what the.....my keys. *hands move faster and she begins to breathe rapidly*
My keys aren't here. I locked them INSIDE MY APARTMENT!!!!
Yep....talk about the odds.
So now we have a business woman, a man in his boy shorts sitting on the tile against a brick wall, and a cat. All locked outside their apartments during a winter morning.
I wish someone had been there to take a photo.
Anyway, I'll wrap all this up. After a while (and some awkward conversation) she eventually wandered off to the maintenance office alone (I didn't have to convince her that I shouldn't go with her) and we made it back inside our respective homes. The bright side of all this is when I eventually made it to the coffee shop, the barista offered to give me a drink on the house after inquiring as to why I was going outside my usual order and requesting the "black eye."
If you somehow made it this far, I give you an internet high five. Nice job! Be back on Monday with the usual content.