I just got the strangest phone call.
“I’m locked in my car.” That’d be Nick.
“Where are you?” See, it was 7:30 in the morning and I was still groggy.
“In my car.” Mmhmm.
“And where’s the car?”
“Well now I’m driving to work, because I had to call Karine [his French teacher] and tell her that I couldn’t get out of my car.”
Hmmmmm. I should mention here that our car doesn’t technically have a key. It has these little remote thingies with buttons to work the locks, which you stick into where a key would normally go beside the steering wheel before pushing the “Start” button on the dash, which is how you start the car. The driver’s side also has a set of buttons that control the door locks, but Nick assured me that those weren’t working either. “Wasn’t there a way to do it through the main computer?”
“Yes!” I blurted. “Um…I don’t remember how. There’s something that controls how the locks work, like whether they all open or whether there’s one that’s set as a childproof lock, but I don’t know if you can just tell it to open everything. But maybe your door got set to childproof?” The driver’s side door? Right; no. That shouldn’t be an option.
But he checked anyway, which promptly cut off our phone call, because his cell phone was set to run through the main computer so that we could talk through the built-in hands-free system. By the time we reconnected, I had done some more thinking.
“So the remote doesn’t work, or the buttons inside, and it won’t open when you just try the handle, so it’s not just like the remote’s dead.”
“No–at first I thought it might be some kind of anti-theft thing, but you’d think it wouldn’t let me drive the car if it thought I was stealing it.”
That reminds me. “Was there anything weird about the way you got into the car?” Because what are the odds that the system would break down during the five minutes it took him to get to Karine’s place?
There was just the briefest pause. “Well, the doors wouldn’t open. So I had to climb in through the trunk.”
Now we’re getting somewhere, even if it’s just in terms of entertainment value. “So you climbed in through the trunk because the doors wouldn’t open,” I repeated slowly, feeling the hysteria bubble up in a way that made Juliette sit up curiously.
“I thought the remote battery was dead!”
“You broke into your locked car and now you’re locked in.”
“No; well at first the back driver’s side door unlocked. So I thought maybe the remote got confused, and so I locked that and figured when I pressed Unlock it would open again and I could get out that way.”
The remote’s not the only thing that was confused this morning, right? “If the back door opened, then why did you climb in through the trunk?” I’m sorry, but someone had to ask it.
“I didn’t notice that it was unlocked until I got inside!”
“At which point you…locked it.”
“And now it won’t open, either!” Because no one who’d been forced to climb in through the trunk of their car could have seen that coming.
I think that this was about the last coherent thing that either of us said–I was laughing too hard and Nick was blushing so much that the phone was practically turning red. He’s fine, I promise; he’ll get to work, climb out his window (I asked why he wouldn’t just go back out through the trunk, but he didn’t answer), ask the receptionist to put in a service call, and hopefully everything will be normal again by dinnertime. But doesn’t it kind of make you nostalgic for when you could push the button and feel the physical, mechanical response of the lock turning? I think that Nick’s missing that pretty hard right about now…this should be about the time that he’s climbing out of his window.
Assuming that it will still open, that is.