Keys Locked In Car

Yes, I know we just had an incident where we accidently locked ourselves OUT of the house. Thankfully it wasn't awfully cold that day and it was a somewhat easy fix. You would have thought we had learned our lesson and had extra keys for everything put in different places. Well, you would be wrong.

Since it has been so cold this week, Daniel has been really sweet and gone outside to start the car before we leave. Yesterday, after doing this, he shut the car door too soon after starting the ignition and the doors automatically locked with the keys inside.

It is a good thing we had not locked the house yet and didn't have to sit outside freezing while we figured out what to do... Daniel had me call AAA while he tried to figure a way to get into the car. He really thought we had a spare key somewhere, but was unable to find it. AAA had a high call volume, so I was on hold while Daniel searched the house.

Some time last year, Daniel installed a clicker for our car and he was pretty sure we had a spare one somewhere. He found the spare and went outside to try to unlock the doors. Evidently it was not the right clicker since it would not unlock the doors immediately. However, after pushing multiple buttons, all of a sudden the car unlocked itself and the car alarm went off.

I was still on hold at this point, so we didn't have to use AAA after all. This is the second time we have been able to "break" into our house/car... amazing how simple both of these experiences were... it seems like this stuff should be harder.

On a side note: We now have multiple copies of house and car keys and they are all in different places in case we lock ourselves our of our house or car...

Locked Out

Since Daniel and I started driving one car we normally only carry one set of keys between us. Every day as we are walking out the door we always ask each other if we have the keys. Once we have confirmation that one of us has the keys we turn the lock and shut the door behind us.

For some reason this morning, as we were headed out, neither of us asked this important question. I pulled the door shut and we looked at each other with the realization that I had just locked us out of the house and car.

In a futile attempt, Daniel went around back hoping there was a key in our secret hiding spot, knowing that it wasn't there.

Then we discussed our options:
1) Call AAA and have them come unlock the car. Then we would have access to the garage door opener and could get in the house.

2) Call a locksmith and have them come and break the door knob off of our front door.

3) Break one of the paneled windows out of the garage door and crawl through it.

4) Try to use a credit card to break in through the front door.

After discussing we agreed that we would try the credit card first and if that didn't work we would call AAA.

I dug through my purse and found a flexible discount card to Office Max that I don't use... Daniel jimmied the lock in less than a minute. Two thoughts ran through my head: I was glad that it was so easy to get to our keys and head on to work. But it was also a little unnerving that it was that simple to get into the house. When we are home we always throw the dead bolt but for some reason we never do when we leave during the day. I think we will start using the dead bolt more.

Moral of the story: Use the dead bolt AND keep extra keys somewhere.