Lost Keys and Odd Jobs
Odd Jobs and Lost Keys
Here’s a pet that someone left. I took it to a pet store. They said it was a gentle reticulated boa. Nice.
Keys get lost, but they’re always somewhere. One customer told me that a crow flew off with her keys. Most locksmiths have found lost car keys hanging in the passenger side door lock (maybe that’s why they stopped putting locks on that side), and once I found lost keys for an auto dealer who had left them hanging in the ignition. Did I charge him for a service call? Well, he already felt dumb, so of course. At Lake Tahoe, you could often see a boater’s keys clearly on the bottom through twenty feet of water. I got so many of those jobs that I had an actual policy . . . I don’t row. I lost the key to my mother’s condo, then found it two years later in a pair of fancy pants that I would have sworn I never wore. I once lost a master key in a patch of lawn twenty feet wide between my van and an office building. A UPS driver helped me find it before I had to start re-keying the building again. This one takes the cake, though. A customer told me that they finally found that lost motorcycle key, six months after I made them a new one. Where was it? At the bottom of a trash can that they emptied weekly, stuck there on a piece of gum!
I once got a call from a young mother of two who told me that her grandmother had died and left her a car with no keys. The car was in the garage of a respectable house, and the woman had her two kids with her. It turns out that the woman stole the car from her parents, and I made her the keys. I found out two weeks later when the local sheriff had me pick her out of a line-up. I couldn’t identify her though, because the six women they chose looked like sextuplets. The parents identified her well enough, it turns out. I’ve found wild animals in vacant houses (snakes, hawks, rats, mice, bats, dogs and cats), and I’ve even had a female customer at a raucous party greet me at the front door without her top on (my wife is in the service vehicle, ma’am). But this was one of the most memorable . . .
It was a dark and stormy night back in the 1900s (around 1985), massive snow drifts and white-out blizzard conditions. I chained up my boxy ’75 Ford van and went out to the west shore of Lake Tahoe to open a cabin for a family who had spent a full day driving 200 miles from San Francisco. They held the flashlight while I picked the lock. When the lock picked, I reached in through the door, flicked on the lights and stuck my head inside. I was the first to see that a massive Ponderosa pine had crashed through the roof and lay in the living room with drifts of snow powdering the entire interior of the house. Before they entered, I remember saying, “I have some bad news for you folks. And, here’s my bill.”
During the Great Recession, when locksmiths made some money by re-keying properties for banks and realtors, there were so many tenant evictions that I knew the County Sheriffs by name. You know the scene . . . while Sheriff John is donning a flak jacket and taking the safety off his pistol, he says, “Hey, Mike, go up there and pick the lock, then stand back while we enter the premises.” No pressure there. I’d bring my pipe wrench right to the front door in case I couldn’t pick the lock in a minute or two, not because I thought someone was actually inside the house, but because sheriffs hate to wait. They—like everyone else—think locksmiths should take one deep breath, and then like Houdini, pick the lock as if we’re under water.
Repossessions ran the spectrum from spectacular mansions to broken down hovels, and locksmiths saw the entire array of what one might call the human condition. We’ve had our chance to accumulate all sorts of things that were too heavy, cumbersome or just plain un-needed by previous tenants, time after time hearing that phrase, “It’ll all just get thrown into a dumpster.” Hence we have barbells, odd barbeques, lumber and rolls of tar paper. We have bird baths, lawn swings, hammocks and potted plants. We have old encyclopedias, travel books and Disney videos. The only reason we don’t have more isn’t because we’ve run out of space—we have—it’s because our spouses finally put their foot down. Over time, as we find that we don’t want the free stuff, we’ll have to get rid of it.
