Last night, Susan and Mason left to run to the store and pick up dinner, so while they were away I decided to pull out the old lock picks and do some more practicing. <\/p>\n

At this point, both the deadbolt and the door handle on my front door are no fun; I can pick either lock in ten seconds or so using a rake pick, and in less than a minute using a standard pick and doing each pin one at a time. Looking for a new challenge, I decided to try to pick the deadbolt on the door between the laundry room and the garage. The lock is kind of jacked up and hasn’t worked right the whole time we’ve lived here — in fact, our house key doesn’t even work on that lock. That means if I managed to pick the lock closed, I’d also have to pick it again to reopen it.<\/p>\n

I propped the door open with my foot (so I would be able to see when the bolt moved) and had no problem picking the lock. I tried with a rake first and got it in like thirty seconds. I decided to pick it the other way with a standard pick, which I eventually did — except this time, when the lock rotated, the deadbolt didn’t retract. Thinking the lock might just be stuck, I reached around to close the lock manually and discovered that the lock uses a key on both sides. Oops. I then swung the door open and then successfully picked it from the other side with the same results; the lock rotated, but the deadbolt again didn’t retract. At this point, I was officially screwed.<\/p>\n

I was hoping Susan wouldn’t notice, but the first words out of her mouth when she got home were, “Why is it so cold in here?” When she went to close the door, she immediately saw the problem. She asked me what my plan was and she wasn’t particularly impressed with the fact that I didn’t have one.<\/p>\n

After the kids went to bed I messed around with the deadbolt for another ten to fifteen minutes before using a lesser-known lockpicking tool … the hammer. With the lock rotated I hammed the deadbolt back into place and was able to get the door closed. I’m just glad I didn’t pick the lock with the door closed … I have no idea how we would have fixed that one.<\/p>\n

Note to self: don’t pick locks you depend on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last night, Susan and Mason left to run to the store and pick up dinner, so while they were away I decided to pull out the old lock picks and do some more practicing. At this point, both the deadbolt and the door handle on my front door are no fun; I can pick either lock in ten seconds or so using a rake pick, and in less than a minute using a standard pick and doing each pin one at a time. Looking for a new challenge, I decided to try to pick the deadbolt on the door between… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1929"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1929\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}