My life constantly conspires to stress me.  It doesn’t seem to matter what I do, or how much stress I’ve recently got on top of, something always turns up to fling me back into the path of stressed out.  But I am pleased to report that the latest episode of totally unexpected stress has finally ended!

These days it is not uncommon for people to keep valuables in their homes.  Things like jewellery and sentimental papers, credit cards, birth certificates, financial documents and the like.  And of course, passports.  And home safes are becoming increasingly popular as a result. 

Like a lot of people I imagine, we have a touchpad safe and when the batteries died we were prepared.  All we had to do was use the back-up key.  And we knew exactly where it was. Right?

Wrong.  The key wasn’t there even though we BOTH thought it should be.  We don’t lose things which means someone has moved it and with four year old twins the likely culprits are obvious! 

No problem I thought, I’ll phone the manufacturer for a replacement key.  After all, it wasn’t URGENT that we could access the safe, although my other half will soon need his passport…

Wrong again! Having tracked down the manufacturer by a circuitous route via one of their online customers, I discovered that not only is our make and model FIVE years discontinued but there are no longer any spare keys!  My stress levels reached fever pitch.

Faced with the inevitability of an astronomical fee from a locksmith for drilling into the safe (obviously anyone needing to break into their own safe is desperate and therefore willing to pay through the nose), the damage caused to the surroundings (the safe is bolted securely down) and the cost of replacing it with another working safe, I thought laterally.

Twenty minutes later my hairdryer breathed enough life through the safe door and battery panel into the batteries for them to recognise a key code and open the safe door, thus saving us, conservatively around £300.  Fantastic!  And we have access to the passports again!

An alternative title for this post was “WAHM uses hairdryer to crack safe” but I thought it gave the game away too soon.  What do you think?

Related posts

• A Salutary Lesson From A 4-Year-Old (0)
• Why You Should Ignore NewsFlashes (2)
• The Stress “Columbo” Comment (2)
• The Stress Of Too Much Fun (1)
• Stress Relief – You Need To Sleep on it (0)