For years now we’ve chuckled at the folks who can’t open our bathroom door from the inside.
You gotta jiggle the handle just right and maybe pull back a little at the same time, otherwise you’re stuck. This is the living definition of inside information.
Some otherwise very dignified individuals have been reduced to banging on the door and yelling for someone to let them out.
Yesterday the yeller was me. Minus the dignified.
And this time, when help arrived, it was to no avail.
My teenage daughter was the only other person in the house. At first she ignored the standard handle-rattling and thudding as standard egress procedure. Then, after all the usual tricks failed and I yelled for help, she approached the door and tried it from the outside. Nothing happening from that end, either.
We twisted, we turned, we thumped, we jiggled.
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This, as my mother would say, was quite a pickle.
Having watched some detective shows in my day, I talked my daughter through the old pick-a-lock-with-a-credit-card trick only with a butter knife, all the while suspecting it wouldn’t work in this instance, and I was right.
Then I figured I’d climb out the bathroom window. This effort stalled two panes deep when it became obvious that the only option was to punch through the decades-old screen window or have my teenager haul a ladder up from the pole barn and then talk her through the exteriorized window extraction procedure.
I returned to the door. It’s a ’70s vintage hollow-core. There was — back to the detective shows again — the option of putting my shoulder to it and bursting through in a shower of heroic splinters. This seemed overkill in light of the situation and our health insurance deductible.
“Can you see a screw on the knob?” I asked my daughter. She answered in affirmation and so I sent her to the laundry room toolbox. I am the worst handyman ever but I have taught my daughters the difference between a standard and Phillips head screwdriver. In minutes she had removed the knob.
Due to the mangled state of the hub and spindle mechanism (several shards of stress-cracked metal fell out) we still couldn’t work the latch, but my daughter passed a needle-nosed pliers under the door and using those I was able to slide the latch bolt back and release myself.
It is dumb that I never fixed this door, but I will forever cherish the goofy 10 minutes my daughter and I shared. She got to chuckle at dad while helping dad. There is of course the implied question of what sort of provider allows things to reach this state of decay, but hey, let’s not point fingers or assign blame and anyway poetic justice was served when said provider became the terminally trapped.
In that context, we proceed to the greatest miracle: That evening after dropping that same daughter at dance class, I ran to the home improvement store and bought a new doorknob set. And immediately upon returning home from dance class, I successfully installed it.
On the first try.
With no swears.
I stood there opening and closing it as if I had built the whole house.
An original “Roughneck Grace” column exclusive to the Wisconsin State Journal. Audio versions may air on “Tent Show Radio”(tentshowradio.com). Read more from Michael Perry at www.sneezingcow.com.
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March 19, 2022 at 09:30PM
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