{"id":1998,"date":"2011-03-05T19:20:34","date_gmt":"2011-03-06T00:20:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/?p=1998"},"modified":"2023-12-20T16:25:14","modified_gmt":"2023-12-20T21:25:14","slug":"momo-all-hands-day-4-another-gorgeous-day-and-then-a-dicey-situation-at-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/2011\/03\/05\/momo-all-hands-day-4-another-gorgeous-day-and-then-a-dicey-situation-at-night\/","title":{"rendered":"MoMo All-Hands: Day 4 (Another Gorgeous Day, and then a Dicey Situation at Night)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As usual, I woke up, grabbed a shower, and headed down to breakfast.\u00a0 The routine was really starting to sink in.<\/p>\n<p>Breakfast was yogurt, croissants, and granola, with little cakes.\u00a0 Very tasty.\u00a0 And the weather?\u00a0 Gorgeous as usual.<\/p>\n<p>After breakfast, we were underway.\u00a0 There was lots of talk about features in the upcoming version of Thunderbird.\u00a0 There was a long talk where we batted around ideas on how to reward contributers to Thunderbird.<\/p>\n<p>I got a lot done that day &#8211; I&#8217;d been having some trouble getting Ubuntu Natty running on my laptop virtual machine, and I finally got it going.\u00a0 I kicked off a Thunderbird debug build, and got <a href=\"https:\/\/launchpad.net\/globalmenu-extension\">the globalmenu extension I was tinkering with<\/a> compiled.\u00a0 I had a segfault to solve, and I dug into that.<\/p>\n<p>Around five, we broke for dinner.\u00a0 Everybody was going to different places, and I chose an Italian restaurant called Il Lupino with Karen, Gozer, Shane, and Mark Banner.\u00a0 The restaurant was new, and seemed like they were still getting their act together.\u00a0 It seemed like there were a lot of waiters standing around not doing much, and only one or two staff running around doing a whole bunch.<\/p>\n<p>It was a bit of a wait, but they fed us bread.\u00a0 Eventually, dinner arrived, and it was tasty.<\/p>\n<p>After dinner, we walked back to the hotel along the beach.\u00a0 It was a nice, cool night.\u00a0 There was a super fine mist in the air, which I gather is the Hawaiian version of a light rain.<\/p>\n<p>When we got back to the hotel, a bunch of people were playing XBox in the meeting room.\u00a0 I watched for a bit, played a few rounds, and eventually called it a night.<\/p>\n<h3>Trapped<\/h3>\n<p>I headed up to my hotel room, and started getting ready for bed.\u00a0 As I was brushing my teeth, I noticed something strange about my bathroom.<\/p>\n<p>The bathroom was divided up into two sections.\u00a0 One section had the sink, a big mirror, and a bathtub.\u00a0 The other section was where the toilet and the standup shower were.\u00a0 The sections were divided by a doorway that didn&#8217;t have a door to go with.<\/p>\n<p>Or so it seemed.\u00a0 On closer inspection, it turned out there <em>was<\/em> a door to go with the doorway.\u00a0 It was a sliding door, like one might have to out onto a back patio, and it was recessed into the side of the doorway.<\/p>\n<p>I was curious, so I pulled it out to take a look at it:<\/p>\n<p>[simage=771,288]<\/p>\n<p>The only feature on the door was a little metal plate for sliding it back and forth:<\/p>\n<p>[simage=769,288]<\/p>\n<p>And you&#8217;ll notice that in the center of the little metal plate is a white button.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m a naturally curious guy, and I wanted to see how the locking mechanism worked.\u00a0 So I closed the door, and pressed the white button.<\/p>\n<p>It only took me a few seconds to realize that there was no way to <em>un<\/em>-press the white button. I had just trapped myself into the toilet\/shower side of the doorway.<\/p>\n<p>At first, I thought this was really funny.\u00a0 What a stupid design for a door!\u00a0 After a few seconds of laughing at myself, the gravity of my situation started to sink in:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>I had no cell phone to call for help.\u00a0 No roommate who&#8217;d be coming in.<\/li>\n<li>Nobody would be looking for me until morning.<\/li>\n<li>The door didn&#8217;t have any hinges for me to take apart.\u00a0 And, because it was a sliding door, it meant that all edges of the door were recessed into the doorframe, which meant no kicking it down.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;d put the &#8220;do not disturb&#8221; on my door, so I couldn&#8217;t count on the cleaning lady to let me in in the morning.<\/li>\n<li>The space in that section was about the size of two phone-booths combined.\u00a0 If I had to sleep there, it&#8217;d be an uncomfortable night.<\/li>\n<li>It was late, so banging on the walls and making a huge ruckus was probably a last option.\u00a0 And there was no guarantee that any of the rooms near me were occupied.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>It was a sticky situation.\u00a0 Not life-threatening by any means, but quite a predicament nonetheless.<\/p>\n<h3>Macgyver<\/h3>\n<p>So, after thoroughly examining the lock, my first step was to take an inventory of my tools:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>There were towels and toilet paper.\u00a0 I didn&#8217;t see how I could use those on the lock.<\/li>\n<li>The contents of the toilet tank included the floater ball, and a chain for the drain mechanism.<\/li>\n<li>The shower head was connected to the faucet via a snaky metallic tube that could be disconnected at both ends.<\/li>\n<li>I was carrying my wallet, which had some paper money, and some coins.<\/li>\n<li>I was wearing my belt.<\/li>\n<li>I had shorts on, and the metal tab on my zipper could possibly be used as a screwdriver.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>I decided to attack the lock with my belt.\u00a0 I rammed the swing-arm on the belt buckle into the area between the white button and the metal plate, seeing if I could make some room on either side of it.\u00a0 I ended up working away some of the plastic on the button, and was able to make some space.<\/p>\n<p>Ok, so now I could wiggle the button back and forth.<\/p>\n<p>Continuing with my belt, I tried to &#8220;scoop&#8221; the button out &#8211; but the plastic was too slippery, and I didn&#8217;t seem to be making and progress.\u00a0 And, at some points, it seemed like the button was going farther in, and I really didn&#8217;t want to make my situation any worse.<\/p>\n<p>I switched tools, opened up my change wallet, and pulled out two dimes.\u00a0 My fingers were too big to pinch the button and pull out, so I tried using the dimes.<\/p>\n<p>It was starting to get hot in there.<\/p>\n<p>With one dime pinched in each hand, I worked them like the world&#8217;s most awkward tweezers.\u00a0 I grabbed the button, squeezed inwards towards the button, and tried to pull out.<\/p>\n<p>The button was slick, and the dimes kept slipping off.\u00a0 It didn&#8217;t look good.<\/p>\n<p>And then&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Suddenly, I had a good grip on the button, and the dimes pulled it out.<\/p>\n<p>I fist-pumped, slid the door open, and enjoyed the cool air.\u00a0 I&#8217;d been trapped for about 25 minutes.\u00a0 It was good to be out.<\/p>\n<p>And then I took some photos.\u00a0 Here&#8217;s a shot of the toilet\/shower room just after I escaped:<\/p>\n<p>[simage=770,288]<\/p>\n<p>and here&#8217;s a shot of my trusty, if clumsy, tools:<\/p>\n<p>[simage=772,288]<\/p>\n<p>I went to bed pretty exhilarated.\u00a0 I was looking forward to telling everybody about this at breakfast the next morning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As usual, I woke up, grabbed a shower, and headed down to breakfast.\u00a0 The routine was really starting to sink in. Breakfast was yogurt, croissants, and granola, with little cakes.\u00a0 Very tasty.\u00a0 And the weather?\u00a0 Gorgeous as usual. After breakfast, we were underway.\u00a0 There was lots of talk about features in the upcoming version of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[862,899],"tags":[900,928,901,916,929,904,877,867,927],"class_list":["post-1998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thunderbird","category-traveling","tag-all-hands","tag-escape","tag-hawaii","tag-ilikai","tag-macguyver","tag-momo","tag-mozilla-messaging","tag-thunderbird-2","tag-trapped"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prmTy-we","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1998"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1998\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3134,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1998\/revisions\/3134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}