Here’s the situation. It’s 9:30 pm and you want to go for an evening swim, you’re really looking forward to it. You get down to the community pool, jam your key in the lock, turn and… nothing happens. No matter what direction you turn the key or what you try, the lock doesn’t seem to “unlock”, something’s broken. You try for a few minutes but it is readily apparent that you aren’t going to get anywhere. This is annoying and frustrating as you really wanted to go swimming tonight. So what do you do now?
If you’re a normal person, you resign yourself to the fact that you’re not getting in to the pool, and you go back home. You stew about it for a little while and make a note to call the property management company tomorrow and hope they get someone out to fix the lock that day. You know full well that they probably won’t and you’ll be lucky if it gets fixed in the next week.
That’s the boring and pedestrian way of thinking.
If you’re Jon, things are much more fun. First, you go get a chair from your house and stick it in front of the stuck pool door. You know how locks work, so you reach over and see if you can reach the inside lever. You can, but that does no good either, as expected. So you retreat to your garage to retrieve a screw driver and a flashlight. You balance precariously on the chair while reaching over the pool fence to unscrew the lock. After a few minutes of work you can pull both sides of the lock off, leaving just the bolt in place.
Amused with your handy work, you begin to futz about with the inner workings of the bolt, studying the mechanism and why it isn’t working. Stab a few critical components and POP, the bolt is free and clear again. You open the door to relish your handy work. Spend a few minutes to carefully reassemble the lock and put away your tools, then you can get back to the task at hand. Gleefully you turn to the pool to enjoy you evening swim. Somewhere in the back of your mind, you’re just as amused by your diabolical handy work, as you are of the fact that either no one saw you spend 20 minutes breaking into the pool or decided not to say anything.
Yea, my life is a bit more interesting than most. Taking things apart and putting them back together used to get me into a lot of trouble when I was younger (mainly because I had problems with that “putting it back in _working_ order” thing), but I’ve learned a thing or two since I was a chibi. I really do take great pride in my handy work, especially when it turns out so well (Translation: the lock is fixed, and I got to swim). I even went so far as to mention the escapade (including the part where I “break in”) to one of the association board members and they were pleased; they don’t have to call the locksmith which would cost money. Hopefully, they’ll keep my mad MacGyvering type skills in mind for when I am caught doing something crazy (like breaking into the complex utility closet, which is on my list of things to do).