Let me ask you this: how many times have you used a door knob to open a door? More than once per day, I’m guessing. Am I right? Good.

Now, during how many of those times have you thought about how that door knob works? Less than once per day, I’m guessing. In fact, if you’re anything like me, you may never have thought about it at all.

So, what if the door were to close one day, and the door knob didn’t work properly to unlatch the whatever-that-thing-is that goes into the door frame. How would you then open that door?

Good question, eh?

As you might suspect, I don’t ask this question randomly. On Friday night we had our neighbors over for dinner. After dinner, we sat around the kitchen table talking for a few hours. Since the bathroom opens off the kitchen, we had pulled the door almost all the way shut. Then, at some point, the wind picked up outside. Since windows were open in the bathroom and elsewhere in the apartment, the ensuing breeze pushed the door completely shut.

Normally, this wouldn’t be a moment worthy of a blog post. However, after our guests left — it was about 11:30pm — I went to go into the bathroom. I turned the doorknob as usual, but it just turned without clicking, as it would normally do to open the door.

There is a deadbolt style locking mechanism on the door in addition to the doorknob. But we were pretty sure that it was in the unlocked position, judging from the position of the lock that we could see on the kitchen-side of the door. So, it wasn’t that the door was locked. Rather, it the doorknob itself that wasn’t working properly.

What wasn’t obvious was what to do about it.

Now, one of the neighbors who had just left is pretty handy around the house, and we knew that he had a large set of tools. Further, we knew he was still up at that late hour, since he had just left our apartment. So, I went and got him, and together with him, Chris and I tried to dismantle the doorknob. Our thinking was that if we could take the whole doorknob off the door, perhaps then we could trigger the mechanism inside the door to get the door open.

I should mention that perhaps the most obvious approach, i.e. taking the door off its hinges, was a non-starter as an option, since the hinges were on the bathroom-side of the door.

Anyway, after much fiddling and unscrewing of visible screws and wiggling of this and that, it became apparent that the doorknob was a fancy thing that was actually fastened to the door with screws coming from both sides of the door; this meant that the doorknobs on both sides of the door were fastened together. So, you would need to open the door to get to the bathroom-side of the door in order get to the final screw removed that would allow the doorknob on the kitchen-side of the door to be dismantled.

But, of course, we were trying to remove the doorknob on the kitchen-side in order to get into the bathroom; getting to that bathroom-side screw wasn’t feasible.

Time for Plan B.

By this time it is after midnight, and it’s becoming clearer that more much drastic measures will need to be taken if we are to gain access to our bathroom. In this case, it was looking on the internet to find a 24-hour locksmith service in Tübingen. Fortunately, it turned out that there actually was one. We will not talk about how expensive it is to have someone come to your home at 1am to open a bathroom door — but it wasn’t like we had a lot of options at our disposal, which is presumably what allows the price to be that high. Let’s just say that it’s more than twice as expensive to need an emergency locksmith at midnight in Tübingen as it was to need an emergency locksmith at noon on a Saturday in Bolzano.

Anyway, we decided to pay to have the locksmith make the midnight house call. Interestingly, it turned out to be not that easy even for the professional locksmith to get the door open, even with all his tools and knowledge of how doors work. He spent a good 10-15 minutes trying to get that door open. Which, if you’ve ever had a locksmith come to unlock a door, you’ll know that 10-15 minutes is an unusually long time (it took less than 30 seconds for the guy in Bolzano to unlock the door years ago, for example). However, at last the locksmith did succeed. Yay.

Once the door was open, he was also able to fix the knob and restore the door to regular working order. The only traces of the problem left at the end were (and still are) the small scratches that we made on the door around the door knob mechanism with our unsuccessful attempts to remove the door knob. Ah well – it seemed like a good idea to try at the time. 😉

I now associate calling an emergency locksmith with life in Europe, as I don’t recall calling an emergency locksmith service in North America. At least the locksmiths we’ve used have all had success in solving the problem at hand. In Bolzano the locksmith had also had some idea of what had caused the problem.

However, for our bathroom door problem on Friday, the locksmith said that he had no idea what could have gone wrong with the mechanism to cause the problem in the first place. He claimed to have never seen anything like it. Therefore,  he had no suggestion on how to prevent it from happening again.

Which was was disconcerting when we realized that not only had there been no way into the bathroom with the broken doorknob, there would have also been no way out of the bathroom with the broken doorknob. It malfunctioned on both sides simultaneously.

Hmm.

Fortunately, no one was stuck inside the bathroom on Friday. And it didn’t happen in the middle of the night when Chris or I would have then been stuck in the bathroom. Nor did it happen when Chris and I were both in the bathroom together. I mean,  we have two sinks, so we tend to brush our teeth at the same time, which means we’re both in the bathroom at the same time. So, theoretically, had it happened the next morning instead of that night, we could have both been stuck in the bathroom together, without any easy way of alerting anyone to get us out.

Now going forward, we can try to always make sure the door is open when we’re brushing out teeth. But, considering that the wind unexpectedly blew the door shut Friday night,  leaving the door open is no guarantee that it will actually stay that way. Therefore, as a precaution, we’ve put some tape over the doorknob catch-thingy, so the door can’t completely close tight.

As a further precaution, we’ve also decided to leave our extra cellphone in the bathroom at all times. After all, the tape could slip and the wind could come and the door could get stuck again.

Are we getting too paranoid? Perhaps. I mean, the odds against that doorknob failing again and someone actually getting stuck in there as a result do seem rather small.

But then again, what were the odds that we would have had any type of midnight adventure with our bathroom door?

Right. The cell phone stays in the bathroom until further notice.