Locked outside

Coming home from work, my wife got locked outside the apartment this afternoon. She recently changed purses and she had forgotten to move her keys from the old purse to the other. As a result, she had to wait for me to be home. In sum, she waited two hours outside. Thankfully, it was sunny and warm. And I was not delayed by anything on the way home. Still, her morale was surprisingly good, given the time she waited. I would have been more fed up.

The same thing happened once to my housemate when I was living in Liverpool. It was in May or June. Back then, I didn't have a mobile phone (nearly ten years ago). I did not have to work that day (blessed time when I was in academia), but I had stopped at the workplace to gather some stuff. I had just walked in my office when the department's secretary told me someone was calling me urgently. It was my housemate, who had gone out and closed the door when nobody was inside and of course had forgotten not only her keys, but her mobile phone as well. She was calling from the retirement house next door. So I left the office without having done the things that I wanted and I took the journey home... to discover that she had been let in by another housemate, who had walked home early. So I missed my chance to be a knight in shining armour then, leaving my office for nothing. On the plus side, I had taken a healthy walk on the hills of Liverpool. And today's anecdote reminded me of this Liverpool memory.