After I got home Friday I was working on the computer when I heard what sounded like someone repeatedly banging on the door of the apartment next door. No one seemed to be answering, so I just tried to ignore it and hope whoever it was would give up eventually. A few minutes after the banging finally stopped, a shadow passed across my computer screen (I had my back to the window and only natural light in the room); normally this just means a passing cloud, but the movement was wrong. Sure enough, someone was walking around on the fire escape. But they didn't seem to be trying to break in to anyone's apartment, so I started to go back to work. Then someone knocked on my window.

"Could I ask you a favor?" my neighbor asked. "Our front door is stuck. Could you go out there and see if you can open it from the outside?"

I wasn't going to say no, obviously, so I went out to the hallway. Turns out the banging had been the neighbors hammering at their stuck deadbolt until the entire lock fell out of the door, leaving a neat round hole -- and the stuck part of the lock still firmly stuck in the door. So the family was peering at me through the hole, giving suggestions as I tried my best to push the door open.

"Should I go get the super?" I asked.

"We already tried -- I don't think he's there," one of them said. (That's what they had been doing on the fire escape.) "Could you go try again, please?"

So I did. The super really wasn't there, but "can't get out of their apartment" was sufficient to get one of his sons to come up and take a look. By that time someone had managed to pick the stuck part out of the door and get the door open, but since the deadbolt needed replacing, it's not like the super didn't need notifying.

The only thing that would have made the episode a more perfect metaphor for my very frustrating week (the job stuff was the worst but only the first of the dead-ends I hit)is if it had been my door getting stuck. Of course, if I happened to read a Pboz submission with a plot like that, I'd probably reject it for having too convenient an ending.