Out and About

Out and About

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Locks in the CR

Locks on doors in this country are strange. Now, most people wouldn't devote an entire blog entry to locks on doors, but apparently locks on doors are a subject close to my heart. Anyway, I'm not talking about locks on main doors. I'm talking about bathroom door locks. They are quite literally locks, with keys.




I wouldn't complain, except they are not always as simple as one might hope. You turn the key to lock it, then turn it the other way to unlock it, and sometimes it doesn't open right away. I have never considered myself a particularly claustrophobic person, but when I am in a one square foot bathroom at a bar or even in my apartment and can't get out, my blood pressure starts to rise.

In the school where I teach, a little girl locked herself in the bathroom; as in, she could not open the door and kept turning the key round and round with no success. She started crying and screaming hysterically in Czech, and I felt more than a little useless. Thank goodness, at that very moment her mother arrived to pick her up and ran up to the door and started speaking to her in Czech, and a few seconds later, after some more attempts of turning the key, she emerged tear-faced and shaking from the trauma.

Some bathrooms, such as the one in this school, have a key in the lock that one must turn to lock and unlock the door. But, hypothetically, if I were crazy, I could easily lock the door, throw the key out the window of the bathroom, and be stuck in the bathroom. No one from outside the bathroom could save me, and my only means of getting out just flew out the window. The window is not big enough for a person to fit through. What would I do? How would I ever leave that bathroom without a fire squad coming in and saving me? Needless to say I have no plans of chucking the key out the window, I'm just saying, it is physically possible.

Now, whatever happened to the door knob with the lovely little button that locks the door and unlocks when you simply turn the handle? I never thought I would miss something as simple as a door lock.




Just to point out, not all bathroom doors are like this. Some have a metal bar that slides easily into a hole in the wall when you close the door, and opens equally as easy.

Although, when going into a new bathroom in a bar, I always test the door before actually closing it. And if it is a weird lock, I just don't lock the door. I have indeed been walked in on quite a few times, but you know what, I prefer that over locking myself in an unknown bathroom in a noisy bar in a foreign country.

In addition, I always always always bring my cell phone with me to the bathroom. Because ya just never know when you're not going to be able to return to your drink as quickly as you want to.

2 comments:

  1. hahaha! Great post! I prefer the random blog entries lol Keep it up!

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  2. Huahua, You should left a couple of sandwiches in the bathroom in case of necessity xD

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