Fi Mushkala Kabeer m3 Baab!

Well since I'm up...

I drifted off into a comfortable sleep at about midnight this morning. At about 1:15 a.m., I heard a weird banging noise coming from outside my room. "What is that stupid cat doing," I sleepily thought to myself. I pulled myself out of bed and stuck my head into the hallway to find Sine.

"Gretchen?" I heard Heather say from inside her room. "Could you try to open my door for me?" She was rather frantically pulling on the door and rustling with her key. So THAT's where the noises were coming from. I joined her futile attempts.

Apparently, when she had locked it from the inside, the lock had jammed in the door and would not unlock. To make matters worse, Heather REALLY had to go pee. We continued shaking the handle and pushing the door with little success. Heather then tried to pass the key under the door to me so I could try to unlock it from the outside. It got stuck under the door.

I got a spoon from the kitchen and pushed it back through to her. She stuck it through a different part of the door, and I was able to grab it. I stuck it in the lock and turned. Nope. The lock wouldn't budge. That's when we got desperate.

I tried to call the guard that lives in our apartment and speaks no English. Heather yelled Arabic words through the door that I was supposed to say to him. "Fi mushkala kabeer m3 baab! Mumkin ta'al hawn hella2?" There is big problem with door! Possible you come here now? Unfortunately he didn't answer, so I was not able to practice my emergency Arabic skills.

Our next bright idea was to try to break down the door. I thought we could bust out the wooden frame the lock settles in. Heather was all for knocking a hole in the door itself that she could climb out of. We tried the frame idea first.

This idea also gave me the opportunity to try my cop-show door-kicking-in routine. Even at 2 in the morning, I am clever enough to realize that kicking down a door in bare feet and pajama shorts is possibly not a great idea. So I tried slamming the door with my shoulder. The only result was a rather sharp pain in my shoulder. I backed up even with the kitchen door, about twenty feet away. I took a running leap toward the door and slammed into it with quite a bit of force.

Once the pain subsided, I picked myself off the floor and faced the still unmoving door. "Go try to find something blunt in the kitchen we can use as a hammer!" Heather called. Sadly, our kitchen seems to be rather devoid of blunt objects that could be used to hammer through a heavy door.

All options exhausted, we called our friend who now lives down the street from us. Happily, he was awake. I got to run down our stairs in my tiny pajama shorts and no bra to answer the door for him. He came into the apartment, grabbed the key and started turning. Between the two of them, he and Heather wiggled the door, and he exerted enough raw, manly strength to get the key turned, thus unlocking the door and setting Heather free.

Yay! We all hugged in relief. After laughing and talking, during which Heather said she had once again considered jumping out of our third-story window (I really must buy this girl a trampoline before she acts on her window-jumping urges), we told Heather she could now go to the bathroom.

Heather giggled. "I already did," she said with a laugh. Apparently, desperate and with no rescue in sight, Heather had used her trash can as a toilet. This caused me to dissolve in sleep-deprived and pain-induced giggles for the next twenty minutes of our conversation. Next time I want a roommate who's house trained! Or possibly I could just get her a litter box?

Three cheers for emergency Arabic lessons at 2 in the morning. Hella2 fi mashakil kiteer!

Now I am going to bed to see if I can get a good three hours of sleep before school tomorrow, which Heather will have to go to, seeing as she can't use the excuse "I was locked in my bedroom" any longer.