Picking A Lock
Friday, August 21, 2009My mom accidentally lost her keys. One of the keys in her keychain included 2 keys to her cabinet. Her cabinet had all her clothes there. Fortunately, there was a fresh batch of newly washed clothes that haven't been kept yet so she had time to look for her keys. But after 2 days, my mom still couldn't find them and then asked my dad and me to help her look for them.
We did look for it everywhere possible in their room but we just couldn't find it. We were hoping that it wasn't accidentally thrown in the garbage.
While we were all losing hope, I decided to try some other keys in hopes that one of them may open her cabinet even if it's not the actual key. I tried around 20 keys and none of them even budged.
With all options exhausted, I suddenly thought of the unthinkable... to pick the lock.
I've never picked a lock and I've only seen it done in movies and on TV. So I took a regular paperclip and deformed it to make it long enough to insert inside the keyhole. Then I took my precision screwdrive set and got the smallest screwdriver to help me maneuver around the lock.
After a couple of tries, I decided that I was thinking the impossible and it would never work. I then took a last look at one of the keys that looked similar to the lost keys and tried to manuever the keyhole again with the paperclip and screwdriver.
And after 20 minutes of trial and error, I shocked myself when I was able to open the cabinet ! I was ecstatic and astounded at the same time. And my next reaction was: "Hey ! I got a new skill !" There was still the other half of the cabinet locked and so to test my newly acquired skill and to prove to myself that it wasn't just luck, I tried picking the other lock.
Since I had some practice from the first lock, I was able to open this lock in 10 minutes. "So it's not luck !" I exclaimed. I was beginning to think if I could do this for other locks too, but didn't bother to try out any other lock cause I already spent around a half an hour trying to open the cabinet.
Funny thing about this all is that not more than 20 minutes after I was able to successfully pick and open two locked cabinet doors, my mom finally found her set of keys. I could've just waited a few more minutes and I wouldn't have to try opening the cabinet... but I didn't mind cause I acquired a new skill: "lock-picking".
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