Getting Stuck

Why does weird stuff always happen to me? Seriously. Here is a good story about a little situation I got into last night.... Beware the perils of a stray towel!

It all started when I decided to take a quick bath before bedtime after talking to a friend on the phone for a while. Normal enough routine, especially as it’s a Japanese custom to take baths at night.

Now, if you have ever seen pics of my lovely, little abode, my “bathroom” really consists of two little stalls attached to the main entryway/kitchen. The bath (a Japanese お風呂/ little cube-shaped tub) is in one stall and the toilet is in the other. Fro the outside, it strongly resembles a ship’s deck, with rounded, metal frame doors and a fake-wood material on the outside. The two rooms do have a dividing wall, but share a window (facing Ito Yokado and the main street) so there is a thin opening between them near the wall.

As I was finishing my conversaton, I went into the shower room/area to stir the water and check the bath temperature. Then I set my cordless on the windowsill and hopped then.

I live alone and the bath/shower area is pretty small, so I will often just leave the door to the kitchen open while I am in the bathtub. The kitchen can get freezing cold in the winter, however, so I sometimes have to shut the door or it gets too cold. Therefore, when I started feeling the cold draft from the kitchen from the tub (despite the warm water), I flung the door shut and just stayed in the room until I was finished with my bath.

OK, let me preface the next part by admitting that I do have a reputation for taking long baths (was a problem in my last house when all three girls had an affinity in this dept), but it was getting really late and I needed to get to bed, so I cut mine short. It was late at this point, but not too bad yet. I had left my towel lying in front of the door and went to open the door to grab it, but when I went to pull the handle, it didn't move. I simply couldn’t get the door open.

I pulled harder, but the door didn’t move. The toilet-room door has a similar handle with a little lock, so I fumbled around for a bit, trying to see if there was any way a lock could have gotten stuck, but it didn’t lock. The door itself was simply just s-t-u-c-k (or, rather, my towel had gotten stuck in the door).

I tried kicking the door and prying it open for while before the naked (no pun intended) reality of the situation started to sink in. I thought about yelling for someone, but it was now past midnight so most people were asleep. I looked around the room for tools I could use to pry the door open and found a little stick-shaped thing. I wrapped it in a washcloth and tried to push the towel out from under the door, but no use. The frame was metal and was too hard to pull. My fingernails hurt from trying.

It was late. I did ironically still have the cordless phone, but I didn’t know anyone’s numbers off-hand. I started to seriously consider my options. I could wait until morning and yell down to someone on the street (yup, and become the naked foreigner on the 4th floor) or try to catch Miwa, my neighbor, when she left her apartment for school, but that meant either staying awake all night or hoping I got up in time to catch her. I contemplated calling the police, too, but again, wasn’t sure I should use the emergency line and was a bit embarrassed about the prospect of squad cars coming to rescue me in the middle of the night. Then I got an idea...

I called up a friend in Minnesota (numbers I actually do have memorized) and had them email Kelly’s phone. We use email instead of text messaging on our cell phones here, and Kelly is a light sleeper so the message woke her up immediately. I told my friend to tell her it was an emergency, so I promptly received a worried call on my house line. Bingo! I had made contact.

Kelly lives a town away and Miwa is the only person with a spare key to the front door, so I talked to Kelly and kkept trying to get the door open while she tried to ring Miwa. She probably tried three or four times without getting an answer, so we called Tu, another friend who lives in the same complex. Luckily, he was still up and swiftly came over.

When Tu arrived, I could hear and talk to him through the bathroom and front door (basically next to each other), but he couldn’t even get in to try to help without a key. He rang Miwa’s doorbell over and over until she finally woke up and they used the spare key to get in. With annoyingly simple ease, they were able to push the shower-room door open. And I was FREE.

Whew. It turns out that it really was the stupid towel jamming the door. Anyways, I promptly made myself decent and we talked for a little while realizing we all had to get up in a number of hours and said our goodnights. Yay for the Jutaku (residence) rescue line, but what a seriously ridiculous situation...that was close.

In hindsight, I guess the moral of the story is to make sure the door area is clear before you slam it shut. It’s just ironic because I am one of the luckiest AND unluckiest people I know. I think the reason why I love television shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm, Seinfeld and Arrested Development so much is because I can relate! It's close to home.