You can learn a lot from trying to break into your own car.

Small personal crises can be excellent opportunities to gain knowledge, learn new skills, and perform with grace under pressure.  Let’s look at the example of being locked out of your own car and needing to get in quickly due to external factors.  You learn a lot about the car, problem solving techniques and, most importantly, yourself.

The purpose of this post is to recount a potentially embarrassing personal experience in the hopes of preventing other people from making the same dumb mistakes that I did, although I do think that my solution was pretty creative.

No facts were harmed during the writing of this post.  Thank you.

How to get yourself into trouble and in need of a solution – fast

It was a Wednesday night and I had just finished my last day of work before Christmas and New Years vacation.  I had my laptop bag and backpack with me as I trudged through a snow-covered parking lot towards my car.  Several dozen people were doing the same thing.  Free at last for a good holiday break.

My black Toyota Yaris was completely covered in over six inches of wet snow.  It wasn’t the light, fluffy stuff that blows away easily with a light breeze.  This now was damp, the kind that squeezes together into snowballs, sections of snowman, igloos and snow forts.  I didn’t have gloves or an ice scraper with me, so I would use my thick winter coat to help brush the snow away.

I started my car and left it running as I cleaned off the car.  I went around the sides, windows, and front hood and truck, wiping the white stuff off with minor effort.  I left the front windshield for last, since it would need to defog and the heat from that activity would make it easier to clean.

When everything except the front windshield was cleared off, I opened the passenger’s door to adjust the heater.  No, actually, I didn’t.  I couldn’t – it was stuck.  I tried again.  The door was slightly ajar… but it was locked.  The car’s engine was running, all doors were locked… and I couldn’t get inside.  It was a stormy night and I needed to get home to take my family out for supper.  This was bad.

The door was still open a crack:  that was my only advantage.  That and being parked beside an office building.  But I was late for an appointment.  I was paranoid that the car was going to run out of gasoline, stranding me there.

Naturally, I panicked.

Problem solving – moving beyond problem to solution

After a few tugs and tries, I established very quickly on that the car door wasn’t going to open without mechanical force or breaking the window.  The gap between the door and the car body suggested break and enter (do they call it that if it’s your own vehicle?) was a possibility.  I went into the office in search for tools or anything useful in order to get into my car, fast.

I looked for long, thin rods in the office – nothing.

Everyone know that you can use a wire coat hanger to break into a car, right?  That was my next idea.  I found two wire coat hangers in the building’s cloakroom.  I removed the colored yarn wrapped around one of them, and then unwrapped the end of the coat hanger from the neck, near the hook.  I bent the coat hanger in half, slipped it into the crack where the door was slightly ajar.  I was able to touch the door lock button with the hanger, but it was flimsy and I couldn’t marshal enough force to press the button.  It was a lot like trying to press a button on an elevator panel with a rubber band or a wet noodle.

Ultimately, it was a useless idea.

I needed something sturdy, but relatively thin to get through the crack in the window.  It wasn’t hard to find white board markers, but I quickly discovered that they were too fat to fit through the crack between the door and frame.

Then I found these.  I like to write with them and they’re thin.

I tried duct-taping together a bunch of these pens (about ten of them in groups of two) to make a long, thin rod.  It was long enough and it wasn’t too bulky except where the duct tape was holding them together.  I got them through the car door… and then the pen rod fell apart as I attempted to shove it into position.  I got blue ink all over my hands.  Phooey.

I was feeling very desperate – I had been trying to do this for over thirty minutes and I was failing miserably.  Virtually everyone else had gone home except for the cleaning lady and she didn’t have anything useful.  There wasn’t even anything useful in her trunk.  And the gasoline was slowly running out.

Finally, in stages, I taped the following things together:

One two-prong barbeque fork (about 18 inches long) – like the one pictured above, only with a much shorter wooden handle that was too thick to get through the crack between door and frame

A normal table knife

Two of those pens

And two more of those pens.

Just picture all of those things duct-taped together into a long misshapen rod that looked like something out of some whacked out barren earth nuked civilization movie (think of Star Wars surplus) and then you can picture what I’m talking about.  I wish I had a picture of it.

The cleaning lady helped me wedge the door open a little more and I was able to stick my MacGyver-ish contraption through the crack.

And finally, success!  I unlocked that darn door by using my improvised, duct-taped rod to press the unlock button.  I opened the door, grabbed the keys, and breathed a sigh of relief.  Fifty minutes had passed and I still had plenty of gasoline in the tank.

Missed opportunities – the downsides of tunnel-vision during problem solving

My vestigial reptile brain was in control as I tried frantically to break into my own car.  I fixated upon finding my own solution to breaking into my car and didn’t think of all my options.  Here are things that I didn’t do during this mini-crisis that I really should have done.

Ask co-workers for help – honestly, I had plenty of time and opportunity early on to ask people for help.  There are over 250 people who work in my building – I’m sure at least a few of them had experience with being locked out of their car.  Unfortunately, I spent so much time messing around with the coat hanger trick that I lost my window of opportunity.

Ask my wife for help – I really didn’t want to go this route because we live close to thirty miles away from my office building.  It was snowing hard that night and I didn’t want my family on the road in those weather conditions just to bring me our spare key.

Call for a local locksmith or car garage to help me get into the car – this never occurred to me at all.  That darned reptile brain.

Call the car dealer – probably would have been useless as I’m sure they would have been closed for the day, but still.  Maybe someone would have been there.

And, of course, the biggest mistake was to lock my keys in the car in the first place. I should have at least left the passenger door wide open.  Unfortunately, these mistakes do happen.

My MacGyver tool was kind of neat.  I should never have had to use it, though.

What did I learn?

There are a few things that I should have learned many years ago, but I find them very hard to internalize and action:

• Ask for help earlier rather than later – I could have saved myself a lot of grief at the very mild risk of looking like an idiot – I looked like a bigger idiot later on.
• Stay a bit more calm and think through all options, not just the one that seems to be quickest.
• Think twice before thinking that a door that’s slightly ajar won’t be locked.

So, there’s my embarrassing story.  I’ve shared it with the hope that other people might avoid making a similar mistake.

How about you?  Do you have any good problem-solving stories?  You can comment on how you successfully solved a problem with or without looking like an idiot.

Images by ernie_c, tinyfroglet, ellievanhoutte, oskay, and others

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• Thinking Inside The Brain – Episode 1
• Looking for a new challenge?