getting to know the neighbors
Wednesday evening, my sister (who is interning in the Bay Area and living with me this summer while Alan is away interning at law firms on the East Coast) and I went out jogging. I took my house key off my keychain so that I wouldn't have to carry the keychain around with me while I ran. When we got back from jogging, I put my house key on my desk. After resting a bit, we decided that we needed groceries in order to make dinner, so we went out again. I grabbed my keychain, and we were off.
You can see where this is going, right? We got back from grocery shopping around 8:30, hungry and excited about trying this recipe for basil chicken, and I realized that I had left the house key on my desk and thus locked ourselves out of the apartment. Unfortunately, Christine hadn't thought to bring her set of keys with her, so we were out of luck there. I called our apartment complex's emergency line, and the person who answered said she would page the on-call person who would hopefully arrive with a spare set of keys.
While we waited, we attempted to gain access to our apartment through alternate methods. Christine tried to climb up onto the balcony (I had left the balcony door unlocked), using the car as a makeshift ladder. Unfortunately, the car and Christine were both too short, and this attempt was unsuccessful. Since we didn't want to dent the car roof, we looked around the complex for something that might support our weight better, so that I could climb on it and then Christine could get on my shoulders, but this was also unsuccessful. We tried doing the credit card trick with the front door lock -- no luck. 45 minutes later, the on-call person hadn't come yet, and we were still locked out of our apartment.
Around that time we noticed some commotion outside the apartment two doors down from mine. A couple who had been doing their laundry was talking to a guy with long hair dressed in biking clothes. Since we were sitting outside with not much to do, we wandered over and asked them what was going on. The guy with long hair, whose name was Adam, told us that the apartment above his was flooding, and water was leaking through the ceiling and into his bedroom. The upstairs apartment was being renovated, he said, so no one was there, and apparently the workers had left the kitchen faucet running. The couple, whose names were Ian and Emily, had noticed the water running in streams down the outside of his window, and had helped him call the emergency line to report the problem.
In comparison to Adam's problem, of course, our being locked out didn't seem like such a big deal. We stood outside with him, Ian, and Emily, evaluating the situation and how to fix it. Ultimately we decided that we needed to get into the upstairs apartment somehow so we could shut off the water. Ian called his friend, who he said knew how to pick locks, but his friend, ironically, was busy with a flat tire. Ian and Emily ended up recruiting another neighbor (whose name, I learned later, was Ben) who according to Emily was "a monkey." Ben was able to climb up on Adam's front stoop railing, pull himself up onto the upstairs apartment's balcony, and unlock the apartment door. The six of us went in and found the kitchen sink torn out, and the cold water pipe connected to a piece of tubing, which had been directed, laughably, into a tiny little bucket. The bucket, of course, had long since overflowed.
Ben tried to turn the cold water off, but even when he turned the handle all the way, the water kept coming out, so we concluded that the cold water shutoff mechanism was broken. So Ian or Adam suggested that we try and reroute the water outside. "We've got a hose," Ian said, and I added, "So do we."
Emily went to retrieve their hose -- and while Adam, Emily, and Christine worked on connecting it to the pipe, Ian and Ben helped me get into our apartment. Luckily, the workers had left a ladder in the apartment as well, so with the help of the ladder and a boost from Ian, Ben was able to climb onto our balcony and unlock our door.
"Thank you so much," I gushed gratefully as Ben appeared at our front door, "you are awesome!" With our apartment unlocked, I was able to lend our hose to the cause, and some duct tape, too. Finally, at a little past ten or so, we had a length of hose snaking out of the flooded apartment and down the stairs, redirecting the water to the courtyard grass outside.
We all stood outside for a few minutes, admiring our handiwork. Adam examined the window outside his apartment. "Yeah, it's definitely working -- you can see the stream of water slowing down." He thanked us and went into his apartment to do damage control.
I turned to Emily, Ian and Ben. "Well, it was nice meeting you all," I said. They agreed, and we all went back inside. Christine and I retrieved our groceries (which had been sitting outside our front door all night), and, after a mutual sigh of relief, started making dinner. About 20 minutes later, some workers finally arrived to fix the flooding apartment. We could hear them banging around, and a little while later Ian knocked at our door to return our hose.
So all in all, it was quite a night. We got locked out, but we ended up helping our neighbors alleviate a flooding apartment, and they helped us get into our apartment, too. Christine learned that she should carry around her set of keys when we go out, even if I'm the one driving. And I learned that I should probably make a couple more copies of my house key... just to be safe.