A few weeks ago I got locked out of my house. I was pottering round in the garden when my wife and daughter bid me a cheery farewell and tootled off to a school gala – all delightfully middle class and sedate. The life mundane.

A Bad Situation

Unfortunately, when the family left, the screen door clicked shut and I was left trapped outside with no keys, no phone, and no patience. Our house is a low-set* and has five separate exits, at least one of which is invariably left open (by mistake) whenever anyone goes out. That day though, the least secure house in Brisbane mutated into a hermetically sealed fortress. I tried all five doors and was amazed to find all five resoundingly shut. It was like Fort Knox, the day after a particularly rigorous security audit. No-one was getting into that place anytime soon.

I tried my neighbours house, to get the spare key, but they weren’t answering. I was stuck. My wife wasn’t due back till late afternoon so I was facing five hours trapped outside. But it wasn’t in freezing temperatures – it’s Brisbane in winter and the weather is delightful. I wasn’t going to die of thirst – the hose was there, and there were lots of garden veggies to stave off the threat of starvation. And the dog was there too, to provide emotional support to the wobbliest of minds – my own. 

I could have waited. I could have been patient. I could have relaxed in the sun for a few hours until my wife came back. But I didn’t.

A Bad Decision

My ADHD non-superpowers kicked in and my entire being fixed onto one pinpoint certainty. I had to get into my house – NOW. Not in ten minutes time, not in an hour, not after I’d taken a few deep breaths and considered my options. Immediately.

The only part of my house I did have access to was the garage, and (un)fortunately the toolbox was there. Armed with a power-drill and hammer, my neurodiverse mind told me I could drill out the lock on the laundry door and get in that way. Simple. I did know that once the door had been drilled out, it would be useless and would have to be replaced, but that was in the future so wasn’t worth considering. This was now, and the only task, the most important task, was to break into my house.

It turns out that it’s surprisingly difficult to break into a house, and what looked to be a flimsy screen door lock proved to be astonishingly robust. After ten minutes of drilling, I’d only made half a centimetre of progress into the reinforced steel of the lock. I changed tack and hit the door with a hammer a few times, but this didn’t work and only served to damage the frame and make the eventual cost of the repairs greater (a minor concern). I recommenced drilling until the lock superheated with the effort, attacked it with pliers for a bit, then found a pointed chisel and hammered that into the lock for a while.

Thirty minutes later, the door was still shut. I took a breath and a butterfly wing of good sense fluttered into my mind. I decided to check my neighbours and see if they’d come back. They were in, and had been all along. Then I came round and realised what I’d done, and the world collapsed. I must have looked pretty distraught, because when my neighbour let me into my house, he gave me a hug. He’s a lovely man.

A Predictable Outcome

One apologetic phone call to my wife later and the incident was over. The laundry door is now jammed shut from the inside too – an ongoing inconvenience to the family, a disappointment to the dog who likes to go out that way and chase possums, and a continuing reminder of my own lack of self-control.

It didn’t have to be like that. Other (sane) options would have been

• Wait for my family to come back and enjoy the Queensland sunshine in my pleasant garden
• Check the neighbours again for the spare keys – even if they had been out, they would have come back soon enough
• Go to any other neighbour, even the one who loathes me, ring the school and get a message to my wife.
• Take the dog for a long walk, then do any one of the above.

But no – I decided to destroy the laundry door instead, in a futile attempt to break into my house. The latest in a long line of ADHD disasters.

* Bungalow if you are in the UK – one of the greatest words in the English language. And like much of our great stuff , we nicked it from India. Thanks guys.