The Mystery of the Locked Door

The wallpaper and wall art for my shop was scheduled for delivery tonight, so I went to my shop a bit early to check how the work was coming and wait for the delivery guy. The front of the shop has a roll down metal security door in the front that is opened and closed by a key fob remote control. I walked up to the shop and pressed the up button… and nothing happened.

Well, that wasn’t good. I tried calling the contractor but he wasn’t answering. I called my wife to see if she had the foreman’s phone number, but she didn’t know. After waiting around a bit and not being able to reach the contractor, I decided to try the back door, which involved going down to the next lane and walking down the narrow alleyway in the back of the shop, with not much light to guide me. The shop behind me has a motion detector light though, so by the time I made it down there, it went on and I had plenty of light.

Unfortunately, though I had a key for the door, it was also bolted on the inside, so even after unlocking it, I couldn’t open it. I went back around to the front where my wife was just arriving to see what was up. She tried the remote a few times herself to make sure I wasn’t just being an idiot, and sure enough it still didn’t open.

After still not being able to reach the contractor, we called up the landlord. She also has a remote for the door, so on the off chance that my remote had suddenly busted between yesterday and today, we wanted to try hers. She lives just down the block so while Maggie called her up, I walked down to get the other key. I met up with the landlord about halfway and she wanted to come see for herself the problem.

We tried her remote and still had no luck. So at this point we were really confused as to how the door could be closed and inoperable at the same time. It had to be working when the workers left for the day. At this point the contractor called me back. He thought maybe the workers had shutoff a breaker out by the electric meter, but after looking for a switch we couldn’t find any. He wasn’t able to reach his foreman, so he said he would come by.

While we were waiting, the delivery guy came with the wallpaper and wall art. Not having any place to put it, we just had him pile it in front of the shop. Then the contractor showed up, and he tried both my remote and the landlord’s remote to make sure we weren’t being idiots and sure enough, it still didn’t work. He also looked for a switch outside and couldn’t find anything.

The only thing he could think of was maybe the remote control box got disconnected and the workers used the manual controls inside to lower the gate when leaving for the day. The foreman was out sick today, so the contractor wasn’t sure exactly what happened.

The landlord was still around, so she let us store the boxes upstairs in the empty second floor apartment. The contractor promised he’d come back tomorrow morning to figure out how to get into the shop. For now, it’s an unsolved mystery how the door came to be unopenable.