“I don’t know what you expect me to be able to do about it,” said the woman at the counter when I told her my storage garage wouldn’t lock.

My to-do project this weekend (weekends these days are Friday and Saturday) included two important things: I was going to go to the recycling center and drop off a lot of the cardboard boxes that have been cluttering up the basement. Then I was going to take some other stuff cluttering up the basement and take that to the storage garage. In case you can’t read between the lines, I am trying to get a handle on the basement.

The initial plan was recycling on Friday and then garage on Saturday, but Clancy was slow getting out of bed from having been on call and it was too late to go to the recycling center. So off to the storage garage I went. It was apparent pretty quickly that it would require two trips. After the first trip, though, I couldn’t get the door to lock. I figured that it might be related to the accumulation of snow and ice that they hadn’t really bothered to clean up. So on my second trip, I took a shovel.

Shoveling the snow didn’t help, though. It still wouldn’t lock. So I worked at it and worked at it and had no success. At some point, I slipped on the ice and laid there in pain for about ten minutes while waiting to get movement back in my arms. Then I worked at it some more. No luck. They do keep Saturday hours (9am to 1pm), I confirmed, so I decided to slap the padlock on there so that it wouldn’t look so obviously unlocked, and then come back Saturday morning.

It was noon wherebouts when I was finally able to make my way back out there. Hoping that maybe the heat would unfreeze something that maybe had gotten frozen, I tried one more time on Saturday before going to the front office. No luck, so I went to the front office.

I explained my problems and she looked at me and said “Well, I don’t know what you expect me to be able to do about it.”

I honestly wasn’t sure myself. I was hoping that I was simply doing something wrong and that she could fix it. Other than that, well, the ball was in her court. The ability to lock my belongings away safely was not tangential to our lease agreement. Indeed, they wouldn’t even lease the garage to me unless I had a lock ready to slap on it immediately. It was pretty central to the deal. She wasn’t particularly surprised by my predicament, only that I couldn’t lock it. She was used to people not being able to unlock it which was the way it usually went. Not very confidence-inspiring.

Without my mentioning my fall, she took note of all of the ice and snow and was apologetic about it. I give her points for that.

Think of the lock of the door I am describing as being like those locks high-ish on the doors of hotel rooms where you flip the knob up and slide a bar across. Except that instead of flipping a knob, you just slide it over and then use a padlock to prevent people from sliding it right back. The problem I ran into below is that it wouldn’t slide. The reason I thought that the snow might be a problem is that it was vertical garage door and if it didn’t get low enough then perhaps the bolt wouldn’t go into the hole the same way a deadbolt won’t work if a door isn’t completely closed.

The solution to my problem was apparently a hammer. She just took out a hammer and pounded away at the lock until it lined up. I slapped the padlock on there and we were good to go. I can only hope that I will be able to unlock it again when needed. She said that it’s okay to use hammers or whatever else to get the stubborn locks to work and that if I break the whole thing wide open they won’t charge me for it. Fair enough, I suppose.

I had arrived at noon in part because I didn’t want to stroll in there right as she was about to leave. As it turned out, she was about to leave anyway and left immediately after helping me out. If I’d actually tried to arrive at the last minute, I would have been greeted with a “Closed” sign regardless of the posted hours from 9-1.

Clancy thinks we need to find a new storage garage. I think it’s worth a whole lot of trouble not to have to relocate all of our stuff. Besides which, if we buy a house, our new storage garage may well be a garage. Or we’ll actually have room for all of our stuff.