#273 Breaking into your own place after realizing you locked yourself out

Neil Pasricha

We’ve all been there.

Whether you left the keys in your car, let a dorm door slam behind you, or just came home late without a key, we feel your pain, we feel your pain, we feel your pain.

Now after the panic drains and you stop going insane it’s time to get your brain together by slipping off your sneakers, pulling a ski mask over your face, and grabbing a giant empty sack with a dollar sign stamped across it. Yes, you’re a cat burglar and it’s time to bust into your own joint.

Unlocked windows, jimmied doorknobs, and bent wire hangers all help get the job done in style. Swing pet doors could also come in handy. Also! Be sure to try and fail to wedge a Mastercard in the doorjam for a couple minutes while saying “I saw this in a movie once”, just for the full experience.

Breaking into your own place after realizing you locked yourself out gives you a smirking sense of jewel thieving satisfaction. You get the high of being a bank robber without the guilt of walking around with a coat full of diamonds.

Let’s just call it a win win.

Let’s just call it

AWESOME!

Wow! The Huffington  Post and Publishers Weekly review The Book of (Even More) Awesome!

— Email message —

“While walking along the cliff at the end of the world… alright, the Coastal Path of the most southern point in Cornwall, UK… I stumbled across this. It makes me smile every time I see it.” – June

59 thoughts to “#273 Breaking into your own place after realizing you locked yourself out”

  3. Whenever I do this I say to myself, “man, some thief could easily get in here.” I then debate whether it’s better to be safe and lock it up or keep it open. I inevitably just let it be because I know I’ll be locked out again.

    1. hahaha definitely crosses my mind. also was scared people were going to call me out for looking like i was breaking and entering

  5. How coincidental! I actually had to do this to get in my house tonight! I always keep a random window unlocked in case this happens.

  6. My dad did this once and had to break a tiny bathroom window and squish through it and ended up with his legs sticking out of the window and his face squashed into the sink XD

  7. never did try the Mastercard trick. I’ve tried the “pull doorknob and whacking the middle really hard” though. Supposedly it should’ve work…but it didn’t. Oh well, I guess I’m not MacGyver enough ;)

  8. I’ve actually done this twice in the last two weeks after going a solid few months without doing it.

  9. Bahahahahahahaha
    Growing up I was a pro at breaking in our house. Mom always locked the keys inside. So much fun going around the house looking for an unlocked window or knowing that the back door has a loose lock and all you have to do it jiggle it for 5 minutes.
    When I moved out on my own I did lock my daughter inside my apartment twice. (Thought the door was unlocked once, went out into the hall while she was napping to talk to someone. The second time-she was a bit older- she was napping and I ran down to my car to get groceries and she woke up and locked me out….and laughed the entire time.) I had to go down the hall to a neighbor to use their crow bar to pry open my door.

  10. When you can still squeeze through that same old window, it’s a weight watcher’s test as well.
    AND if you get stuck, well you can hang out and test your memory instead… “I say to myself, myself I say, how the heck did Winnie Pooh get outta that honey-tree hole AGAIN?!*”
    *The UK, Winnie Pooh, Hangin’ on… LOVE and Awesome in the world, all go so well together.
    As I make my way to “the daily post”, I feel a little light shine within my soul… after…my spirit…Thank you Neil and thank you all who make this beacon of light grow and glow!

  11. Ha ha ha ha, hilarious post! I always carry a giant empty sack with a dollar sign stamped on it for just such an occasion! LOL

    Growing up, my dad was very fastidious, so breaking into anything would definitely NOT be OK. BUT, when you have a bunch of teenagers coming and going at random intervals, people are bound to get locked out. So, we always had a couple of spare keys hidden around. The usual spare key was hidden in the garage. But if the garage was locked too, there was another spare key hidden out in the garden shed. I’m pretty sure there was a spare car key hidden somewhere in the undercarriage of the car, too.

      1. Aw… it is so cute! But I’m wondering what Google ads you’re going to get now that you have “Money bag baby costume” in your search history.

        But what am I thinking? You’ve already got “Lindsay Lohan herpes” in there, so…

        1. Whoa I must have missed something. Is Freddo still bringing up STD’s in the comments section? I’ve got a couple weeks of catching up to do…

          1. Yeah, we missed you! (and I guess *technically* it was me who posted the LiLo link…)

            1. Yes, technically! But Freddo started it. And I missed all the awesomeness here! I hate unexpected travel to lands of barely functioning internet. Well, I was at sea, so more like waters of barely functioning internet.

  12. This happened to me about a month ago – not that I locked myself out but for whatever reason I couldn’t get my side door unlocked and my front door was locked and CHAINED.

    Thank goodness I was able to squeeze my arm through the crack and somehow unhook the chain. Not without some bruising to the wrist though.

    It was AWESOME to get in though, haha

  13. It’s amazingly awesome and embarassing when your neighbor walks by and sees your rear end hanging out of your now screenless window… and then you try to laugh it off while hustling even faster into your room. Good times, good times.

  14. The front door lock broke and I had an angry cat in a carrier who had just been on a long car ride. So I had to leave her in the hall outside my front door and climb up the back porch, which they were rebuilding, so the stairs at the top didn’t connect to the rest of the porch. I had to get across a gap three stories up and across a four foot barrier (to keep people from going down the unfinished stairs), then tear the backdoor screen open so I could unlock that door. Once I got inside, the front door still wouldn’t open, so I had to take apart the lock and use a screwdriver to finish prying open the door. The whole time, my cat was howling out in the hallway. The next door neighbors were home the whole time and could have let me go through their place to get onto the porch at least, but they are recluses and refused to answer the door, even though I could hear them inside. Argh! Well, it was an adventure anyway! Now I know how to do it!

  15. When I was a kid we had a neighbor who was a former burglar. One day we locked ourselves out of the house and he came over and showed my dad how to do the credit card trick. It was pretty sweet.

  16. Growing up my older sister would lock herself, me and our brother out at lease once a week…you think being 10 years older that she would be responsible..not so much haha. Anyways, she would make me, who was 5 at the time climb through our bathroom window to unlock the door.
    And just a few months ago I locked myself and a friend of mine out of her basement suite… my first thought of course was ‘Let’s climb through the bathroom window!”, unfortunately it wasn’t unlocked… and turns out I don’t know how to pick a lock with a bobby pin so we waited outside for about an hour for her landlords to come home and let us in…and she has left her bathroom window unlocked ever since..just in case!

  17. Yep. Did this once at my apartment. I was lucky. My sister was with me. She’s four inches shorter than me and 30 pounds lighter. Shoving her through the window was easier than me trying. She went in like a letter in a mailbox.

  18. I DID THIS! About six months ago I left my keys on the counter and closed the front door and got locked out… I was only able to break in because I *happened* to have left my window unlocked because it had been open to get fresh air. But I could only jump over one of the side gates because the first one was tall and wooden and nothing to climb. The shorter one was still super-high and not really safe to jump down from so I had to throw a trash can (yes, one of those giant blue recycle bins) OVER the gate, so I’d have something to land on that wasn’t slippery mud and concrete (oh yeah, it had been raining, too). And then all of the windows/doors were too hard to open from the outside and my bedroom door was too high to reach so I had to stack patio furniture so I could lift myself up and jump for it.
    Crazy… but I guess its a good thing that its so hard to break into my house.

  19. Oh yeah! This happened with me twice. I learnt my lesson hard way…so now I have an extra key in a secret place. Shhhh… The place is secret!!

  20. That picture underneath that title is just gold.

    There was this time when a friend of mine introduced me to another friend of his. The guy had a huge, fresh bruise in the middle of his forehead. He explained rather sheepishly that the night before he had come home very late and had forgotten to bring his house key, so he tried to climb in through the bathroom window, which was over the bathtub. He made the mistake of grabbing onto the shower curtain rod to brace himself. Uh oh. We all know that’s a dangerous move. Of course he ended up inside, but with his forehead bonking onto the side of the bathtub.
    I ended up dating this klutz for three wonderful years.

  21. Awesome is receiving your autographed bookplates in the mail! So that, even though I’m going through a stressful time and have a crappy cold to boot, that envelope from Canada brought a big smile to my day! THANKS!

    P.S. I’ve check the blog on weekends forever just in case something pops up, but nope. Then, on a weekend when I don’t check, a Sunday Post! Uber cool that you posted on Sunday!

  22. I have done this. Unfortunately I found out afterwards that it would cost $200 to fix the door while calling a locksmith would have been $50.

  23. Btw: Not to knock the Publisher’s Weekly Review (as it was positive, and nice, and all that stuff), but someone over there needs to do a little fact checking.

    I mean, saying that the blog has “23 million hits” might be excusable (if not several months out of date), but then the review mentions that the book is “Scheduled for publication the same week he completes all 1,000”.. What the what??

    I mean, I know we’ve been through this whole calculation before people (and its tripped up its fare share of people), but judging by the fact that we’re currently at #273 and the book is being released at the end of this month, I’m not sure that this is just a problem of simple arithmetic.

    Uhh.. Ooops?

  25. I remember when I was little my momlocked us out of our house and she sent us through the tiny front window to unlock the door. My sister once locked herself outta her car at the park while checking the mail. She had the car running too. I was already at work so she called me and told me to go pick her up after work to get the car. About five hours later we go to the park and the car was sitting there still running

  27. WHY is this so cool? I think it’s because you know your home so well that you get to feel like a well researched criminal. WE GOTTA GO THROUGH HERE! THIS PUTS US IN THE KITCHEN! haha plus you get the little thrill of breaking into a house, with the perfectly logical explanation that you left your keys inside. cops love that!

  28. One time when I was a kid, I had to come home from Ocean City to take a karate test. My dad and I got home, just to realize that we had forgotten the key. We ended up breaking a window in our back door and opening the door from the inside, even though my dad narrowly escaped severely cutting himself. I passed the test, and we got back to Ocean City just in time for a fireworks show.
    AWESOME!!!

  29. I had to break into my own house on a first date (and it was a blind date!) about 20 years ago. My date was absolutely floored that I didn’t ask HIM to break in and crawl through the window, but instead, I broke in and simply asked him for a “boost” so I could climb into the window myself. I guess I must have impressed him. We’ve been married for 18 years now. AWESOME!!!

  30. I love this! My friends and I locked ourselves out of our house the first day we had it. We were covered in every color paint and all went outside to get some fresh air. All doors locked behind us! Luckily I fit through a window in our kitchen after we broke it :( but still awesome! Memories of that are hilarious!!

  31. Been there done that, how funny to touch on a subject we all know a lot about. Once I locked myself out and had to walk to my daughters grade school to get “her key” to get back inside. LOL

  33. I totally agree with this :)
    Once I promised to one family to look after their dog for a weekend. So one morning I had just woke up and let the dog go out from the door and I went for the front yard too having just my nightshirt on. And SLAM! The door was locked, I didn’t have keys and because the house was in the middle of ‘nowhere’, I was scared. I went round the house for a while trying to find a way inside and luckily found a small airing window which wasn’t locked. Phew! XD

  34. I don’t think I’d feel so awesome about my house being that easy to break into. My mom instilled a deep paranoia in me about being robbed or kidnapped when I was little. All the windows on our house had an unnecessary amount of bars on them, so we basically lived in an impenetrable fortress…which also gave me a paranoia about not being able to get OUT of the house in case it caught on fire. So yeah. I just try not to ever lock myself out.

  35. When my daughter was 3 or 4 years old I locked us out. I sent her in through the window. Never did that again. She went to the sofa, turned on the tv and laughed at me! After a few minutes of trying to reason with her, I squeezed my butt through that tiny window. Took skin off of my back and behind! But that was far less embarrassing than the time I locked myself out and had to walk to my daughters school (Grade 6!)to get her key. While wearing my flip flops and pajamas. In the winter.

  36. I always find it funny when the pets on the inside are looking at you like “what are you trying to do, you’re disturbing my nap!”

  37. WAHOO CORNWALL! I have to say I’ve seen that ‘I love you’ thing quite a few times whilst walking down there, and everytime I see it, I can’t help but smile to myself, and wander who put it there, and who it was for. I hope they appreciated it! :)

  38. Well I actually had the keys… just we have two doors.. the one that didnt want to open was the wired one, the key just didnt want to make that “click” sound when you turn it across.. tried about a million times. So decided to get through the bathroom window!!

    Couldnt stop laughing!!

  39. Along this line here is a funny email from my Mom that made me laugh for days……

    Just thought I would lighten up your day. You need to do a search on You tube for a fat woman in funny underwear crawling thru a dog door.

    here’s the story- Koopy (my dog) and Jake(my brothers dog) will not leave the cat alone and she has peed and pooped in my room. The kitty needs to find another home but anyway, last noc they barked at her randomly until I couldn’t sleep. So this morning, I start getting ready for my shower and they start again. I get the cat out from under the bed, head to the garage and the dogs start jumping on me. The cat claws my shoulders and I get in the garage and slam the door shut to keep the dogs off me. I start to go back in to get cat food and I am locked out. I am at least in my underwear.

    I go out side and start trying to get in the dog door. Jake is inside barking at me and Koop is outside biting my butt. My butt by the way is too big for the dog door. So then I come out and look up and there are a bunch of electrical workers in a cherry picker on Val Vista just staring down at me. I swear if they had cell phones, they were recording it. I could have died. So then, I rip the screen out of the kitchen window. It only opens so far at an angle, so I get a chair, climb in backwards and at an angle, take some skin off some tender areas and land on the kitchen counter with dishes flying everywhere.

    What a morning.

    Please come home for next weekend. Love ya, Mom

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  42. I remember doing this one Halloween night, and as I was hanging over the windowsill, my ample a$$ hanging out on the parking lot of my apartment complex, I was REALLY hoping that I would not be a popular video on youtube the next day!!

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  48. After locking all the windows and outside doors, I went outside to try them to make sure, when certain my house was impenetrable, I walked back to the front door and to my shock and horror, it too was well and firmly locked against burglars, and idiots ironically. On no! After 20 seconds of pure panic I realized my only option. An 18ft extension ladder to get up and over a 20ft deck. I wish I had been smart enough to remember I had a ladder last time this happened, instead I decided to scale a 20ft 30year old wobbly trellis. Bottom line; this idiot is getting a hide-a-key. With my scatterbrain it’s only a matter of time until I’ll be playing burglar again…

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