What to do with yourself when you’re locked inside a laundry room in the middle of the night

1:15 am Conclusion came to me: I’m locked inside a laundry room. Literally. Now what?

—–

Heading to New Media Expo in about thirty-six hours so I thought it might be a good idea to get the laundry done now instead of waiting til the last minute. Yeah I know it’s the middle of the night, but my building’s laundry room is located in an offshoot of the parking garage, isolated from the actual apartments, so it’s not like I would be disturbing anyone. Plus, all the machines would be available.

So I take my clothes down to the laundry room, start up two washers worth of clothes, set a timer on my iPhone so I’ll remember to come back and move them to the dryer, turn off the light, and head out. Except the door doesn’t seem to want to open.

“That’s kind of funny actually,” I think to myself, “because it’s one in the morning and if the door really were stuck shut, I’d probably be in here all night.” But after a few minutes of playing around with it I can see that the door knob really is busted, and I am in fact stuck in a laundry room. In the middle of the night. With no one around. This is new territory, even for me.

You know how I like to joke that overwhelmingly improbable things tend to happen to me as if it were impossible for them not to? How many of you have ever been locked inside a laundry room in the middle of the night? You see my point. I knew I could call the building manager to come get me out if it came down to it, but I really didn’t want to have to wake anyone up unless I was out of less severe options.

So I thought hey, I just started up my laundry anyway, might as well sit here for a bit and let the washers do their thing for now. Anyone who comes home and parks in the garage is going to have to walk right past the windowed laundry room door on their way to the elevator, so I’ll wait for someone to do just that. In the mean time I’ve got my iPhone with me, which means that A) I can have some fun telling people about this on mobile twitter, B) it’s time to play some Crash Bandicoot, and C) there’s really nothing much to worry about because I know I can fix this with a phone call if I eventually have to. And because I’ve got a really sick sense of humor about these things, I fired up that old Nirvana song in which Kurt Cobain incoherently sings about being stuck in a laundry room. All these years I never knew he wrote that song for me.

Not that I didn’t spend the next forty-five minutes trying to wriggle, jigger, and/or dismantle that doorknob. At this point it’s already broken so it’s not like I’m doing any undue damage to the building if I, say, happen to destroy the doorknob in the process of springing myself. But Houdini I’m not, and eventually both my iPhone’s timer and the sudden silence in the room told me that the washers were done. Okay, time to move my clothes to the dryers. I mean there’s only one thing you can do while locked inside a laundry room, so you might as well do that while you’re there. Good thing I’d brought enough quarters with me.

About fifteen minutes after I’d started up the dryers, after I’d been locked in the laundry room for just about an hour in total, one of the other tenants did indeed come home and park in the garage and proceed to stand right next to the laundry room door while he was waiting for the elevator. Took a bit of convincing to get him to believe that I really was trapped inside and not just messing with him, but he eventually determined I was for real and went upstairs and got a screwdriver and came back down and popped the doorknob open fairly easily. You know, if only I’d thought to take a screwdriver down there with me in the first place, I probably could have done the same thing from the inside. Lesson learned.

The kicker is that now I have to go back and get my clothes out of the dryer. Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine, I’ll just prop the door open with the trash can. And this time I’ll take my toolkit with me just in case.