lowquality.net

So Sat­ur­day morn­ing I had a much needed hair­cut appoint­ment at 10:30. The awe­some girl that cuts mine and Kim’s hair works out at the Rudy & Kelly in Pem­broke Mall. It’s not a mil­lion miles away or any­thing but on a Sat­ur­day its kind of has­sle because the traf­fic down­town and on the high­way is a lit­tle busy. Not a big deal if you leave on time.

I was on the absolute cusp of not leav­ing on time. If I had gone out our back door and down the back stairs I would have avoided the dis­play of male stu­pid­ity I am about to share with you. Even though we usu­ally park closer to the back entrance, I feel more civ­i­lized using our front door. I feel less like a bur­glar, I guess.

At any rate, the row of mail­boxes ser­vic­ing our apart­ment build­ing is also there. They’re old as hell, bent, warped and, in some places, the locks are held together with impro­vised parts. The key we have is a man­u­fac­tured flat key that looks like it would go to a jew­elry box or some­thing. We only have one and I learned today that we can’t get a copy of it because there’s no way to copy such a key. It was in con­tem­plat­ing this oddly shaped key and open­ing my own empty mail­box that I began to won­der if it was even pos­si­ble that my key for my mail­box was unique com­pared to the keys for the other mail­boxes in my build­ing. I pos­tu­lated that if it was unique it wouldn’t even fit in any­one else’s lock but my own, let alone turn– and I was filled with nerdy male excite­ment to dis­cover that this key could not be unique based on my the­ory because it did fit the mail­box of the neigh­bor across the hall! I was so excited, in fact, that I went so far as to open his mail­box com­pletely to, I dunno, drive the point home… to myself.

The prob­lem arose when I tried to remove the key. It was stuck. Totally stuck. It had turned 90 degrees so it could not be removed from the lock, but some­thing in the appar­ent unique­ness of this key had it jammed inside the lock so as to pre­vent it from turn­ing. I guess when I put the key in I was unaware that I had kind of worked the shape of the key around the works of the lock. My brain scram­bled for poten­tial lies I could tell if I was sud­denly caught red-handed with my key stuck in some­one else’s mail­box. I couldn’t think of any rea­son­able lie that wasn’t even more incrim­i­nat­ing than the truth. The truth wasn’t that believ­able at all, really, because no one could con­ceive that any­one would be so stu­pid as to open some­one else’s mail­box just because they wanted to see if they could. It would be so much eas­ier to just say “I’m a petty lar­ce­nist. I was try­ing to steal your mail. Call the police before I steal again.”

All of these thoughts con­verged in a moment and then finally, in a moment of clar­ity, I said to myself:

“Oh fuck, why did you do that?”

And it was the words exactly that Kim was mut­ter­ing when she was, her­self, des­per­ately try­ing to wig­gle the key out of the lock with her Sat­ur­day morn­ing bed­head and heather gray house shorts. We looked like crim­i­nals, but not very impor­tant ones. She was the Juli­ette Lewis to my Woody Har­rel­son, but instead of Nat­ural Born Killers I was play­ing “Woody” the idiot bar­tender from Cheers. But as Kim is jig­gling the key fran­ti­cally and push­ing and pulling and huff­ing and puff­ing and giv­ing me the stink eye, noth­ing is happening.

Let’s be fair about some­thing though. I open jars for Kim– not even big ones! I set the date and time on her watches. I fetch things off of shelves. I trou­bleshoot her com­puter and I lift any heavy items that might need lift­ing. Get­ting a stuck key out of a lock, by mechan­i­cal inge­nu­ity or by brute force, is not her within her typ­i­cal realm of exper­tise. And it goes with­out say­ing that moron­i­cally stick­ing keys into ran­dom locks like I’m some kind of autis­tic Vince Clortho (obscure?) just to “see if it would work” is also light years beyond her realm of comprehension.

Need­less to say, I can­celed my hair­cut appoint­ment and I called a lock­smith. The guy told me I’d have to wait an hour and a half. I was pissed at myself and feel­ing about as stu­pid as I have felt in… weeks. I started try­ing to think of some casual fan­tasy I could throw out there when then lock­smith came to the apart­ment so as not to seem like as much of an idiot as I really was. Noth­ing came to mind that didn’t involve the phrase “My girl­friend put the key in the wrong mail­box…” so, con­sid­er­ing how dis­pleased she was with me about this whole ordeal I decided to forgo throw­ing her under the bus to save my ego the dam­age. Also, I sup­posed, lock­smiths must have pretty incred­i­ble bull­shit detec­tors. They see peo­ple at their worst on a daily basis and I would just be shoot­ing myself in the foot because he would know I was lying and he would know I was a dirt­bag. Imag­ine how many con­ver­sa­tions with clients do lock­smiths have that begin with “Oh, hi. I did a really dumb thing.” Those would just be the hon­est peo­ple. The rest of them prob­a­bly blame lock­ing their baby in the car with the engine run­ning on the dog or something.

I could see Kim’s wheels turn­ing while she cleaned up the liv­ing room and that she was con­sid­er­ing ways to “lose” me. You know like when you set a pet free to play in a field and then drive off before he returns the frisbee?

About an hour went by.

I had accepted my fate as an imbe­cile and I decided to unwind and play some old arcade games on XMame. I was play­ing Dou­ble Dragon when I finally decided that I didn’t want to pay a lock­smith who prob­a­bly isn’t any more famil­iar with this ancient piece of shit mail­box than I am, to do what I was prob­a­bly capa­ble of myself. Or break the mail­box, which, I decided, I was also capa­ble of. So I go down­stairs with my beloved Leather­man Charge and before I even get to do any­thing I see some­thing white behind the the slot. There was new mail in the box that wasn’t there an hour ago! The fuck­ing mail­man had been there. I was strangely and sud­denly embar­rassed at the thought that at least one per­son besides myself and Kim knew I was an idiot, even though there was no way the mail­man could know that it was my key stuck in the wrong box. For all he knew it was the the cor­rect key that was hope­lessly wedged in the lock for no explain­able rea­son, but he cer­tainly knew some­one was an idiot.

After a lit­tle mess­ing around with the small screw­driver in my leather­man I got the key out. Actu­ally it took no time at all, but the key came out look­ing like a man­gled mess and I spent the bet­ter part of the day using the leatherman’s pli­ers to straighten the key back out. The lock seemed to be undam­aged, so I dodged that bul­let as well. Even bent, though, the key worked effort­lessly in my own mail­box, so go figure.

I walked back into my apart­ment sheep­ishly and handed Kim the two envelopes as a way of say­ing “I am a man and I can fix my own idi­otic blun­ders.” (Both envelopes were addressed to me so there is no other rea­son as to why I would do this.)

“Did the guy show up to get the key out?”

“No.”

“How did you get the mail?”

I told her how. She smiled and shook her head at me. “I have never been with any­one who was so… so…”

Frus­trat­ing. Annoy­ing. Infu­ri­at­ing. Aggri­vat­ing. She’d called me those words a thou­sand times in the last five years.

“…FUN!” she finally said.

So, yeah. I’m not a dum­b­ass. I’m fun.