The Door

By: Connor Lenahan

I have reached a new level of idiocy. Seriously, this is bad even for me.

This summer I am up in Boston working for Boston University. Understandably I am living on campus in one of the dorms. In particular, I am in Kilachand Hall. This is the dorm used in the academic year for the students in the Kilachand Honors College. This means I am living where they put the smartest students at BU.

After last night it became blatantly obvious that I do not belong in a dorm with an intelligence threshold to enter. Why do I say this? I locked myself in my room.

Hold on, it gets worse.

Let’s start from the basics so I can defend myself to some extent. My room in Kilachand is handicapped accessible. I have a giant bathroom all to myself that has properly heightened amenities and a roll-in shower. It’s perfect.

Curiously, I also have a power door. Seriously, it’s electric. Theres a motor above the door that, when lightly shoved or pulled, will open the door from the outside and inside automatically. It’s quite nice to see that this accommodation has been made for those in need, but I don’t need it. I handle doors oddly well with my wheelchair.

I discovered my power door when I first moved into Kilachand. As I went to place my key in the lock on the door I was confused to see a red light and another key hole beside the knob. I put in my key and turned to the right.

The light became green and a small kick to the door opened my new room for the summer. It wasn’t all that complicated to figure out, but it did raise a question: How would I lock my room when I was inside it? If the light was green, thus allowing access to my room, I could potentially have anyone walk in at any time. I didn’t have a lock on the inside of my door either. This was confusing.

So, after making a quick grocery store run last night to pick up a stash of food, I came back to the room. Quickly fading into sleepy Connor mode – it was 11:35 PM – I decided to try out something with the door. I opened the door and reset the lock to the red light before entering my humble abode. The door shut behind me and obviously locked. I went to the door to try and open it back up. I couldn’t.

Uh-oh. This does not look good for Homestar Runner.

I was trapped. This should serve as exhibit A when an argument over my intelligence arises. I’m dumb.

I called the number for the RA on call at Kilachand – a number I was only given about an hour earlier oddly enough – and had them open my room.

With eerily similar parallels to Peter Griffin locking himself inside of his car I had to explain my situation to my rescuers. We proceeded to spend the next half hour or so investigating my room as to why I got locked in.

Turns out that the knobs on my door are basically for show. They do not work. This was half of the reason for why I was locked in. The other half was the hidden evil of the giant door motor.

It’s hard to see, but that’s a brick of a magnet that holds my door from being moved in either direction. So when I turned the key and activated the red light I basically signed up for a mano-a-mano death match I was predetermined to lose against magnet.

Thankfully I was able to get the door back open and got to work on time this morning at the GSU. I’m thankful I checked when I did, because the call to my boss would have been all kinds of awkward this morning.

I took the brief transformation into a prisoner in stride though. As I said on Twitter late last night “I’m at the point that whenever something weird happens to me my immediate reaction is ‘this is gonna be a great article.'”

This is what my life has become. My parents were already worried about me living away from home. This doesn’t help. My bad.

Connor Lenahan (@ConnorLenahan) is a sophomore at Boston University, majoring in journalism.