Fort Knox

Getting into, or out of, our appartment lately, has been like trying to enter Fort Knox. This place is hard enough to get into in the first place - with three different keys in three different parts of the building, plus having to work up the nerve to take the tiny, Soviet-style elevator (which isn't too hard if you think about all the stairs you have to climb in 30 degrees otherwise, actually..). Lately, though, there has been an additional obstacle to getting into or out of Fort Knox appartment 27. The key doesn't work! And believe me, it isn't that much fun to be in your appartment trying to unlock the door from the inside, realizing that you might be stuck inside on the 5th floor with no way out. It isn't that much more fun to come home in the middle of the night with a flat battery on the cell phone, and really needing the bathroom, realizing that you are stuck in the tiny hallway where the lightbulb doesn't work, either. But it does make some pretty funny excuses for why you are late for work, or turned up to an appointment 15 minutes too late...

Today, we had had enough of Fort Knox. Patience is a virtue I don't possess, especially at quarter to nine in the morning trying to get out the door and to work. So today we contacted the landlord.. Who straight away dealt with the problem; by unlocking the problematic lock, and locking the bottom one instead. The one that we don't have a key to, that is. So when I came home with all my groceries and picked-up dry cleaning; Fort Knox wasn't just difficult, but impossible to enter. After some hectic phone calls the landlord came 10 minutes later - speaking only Russian. I think she was trying to say that we must have that key, and I was trying to say that no, we absolutely did not have that key. But after a lot of njets and pointing and head shaking - we came to an agreement and Morten discovered the hidden keyes.

And tomorrow - I have no excuse for being late anywhere.