A Very True Story

This is a story of courage, fortitude and intelligence. It is completely true. Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Actually, this is a story of complete and utter stupidity masked by brilliance. It is actually completely true. These are our real names.

I was around 18 and in my first year of junior college (Hartnell Junior College, home of the Fighting Somethings – I totally cannot remember – some sort of cat I think). Me and my best bud Mike decided to take a quick trip between classes. Now, I happened to have the nice car that day, an expensive Toyota four-door, rather than the mustard color truck I normally drove, so we took my car.

Upon returning from our trip, we hopped out, locked the doors via the automatic door lock and started on our way. However, for inexplicable reasons, the door locks popped back up.

I locked the doors again and shut the door. Once again, the door locks popped up (if you can see where this is going, you are much smarter than I was at 18).

Third time, same result.

Now, in our defense, the car did have electrical problems, meaning that the sunroof would occasionally open at random, so we figured that there was some weird electrical thing going. We began to lock and shut the doors rapidly, assuming that eventually the locks would stay down.

Eventually, we noticed that if you pulled the door handle at the right time, the lock on that door would stay down. So, we hit upon a strategy. I would lock the doors and we would both pull on the handles on each side of the car at the same time, thereby ensuring that the doors stayed locked.

This proved to be much harder than it sounded, but we persevered. We were, after all, highly intelligent college-types with excellent hand-eye coordination. Eventually, we managed to get all the doors locked. This had taken us probably 15-minutes, but in the end, we had triumphed.

Just as I was giving Mike the thumbs up, I realized something. My keys were still in the ignition. The doors kept unlocking because it was a safety device to prevent people from locking their keys in the car.

Still, we congratulated each other. After all, we managed to defeat the security device. Our victory was short-lived, however, as I then realized that I had to call my mom to come unlock the car. Mom showed up, heard the story, commented that we were idiots and unlocked the car. Later that night at dinner, Dad wondered why he was bothering to send me to college.

Some months ago, Mike got married. At one point, I leaned over to him and said Hey, remember that time we locked the keys in the car at Hartnell?

He smiled and nodded Truly, he said. One of our finest hours.

His new wife then walked over. What are you guys talking about?

Nothing. We both responded. I gave him a thumbs up.

Cheers,
-Jason