This week I told you about the trouble I had in a locker room while trying to recover my belongings. It looks like a mix of human error, bad luck, and a provider so obsessed with claiming that its product was 100% foolproof that it had apparently forgotten about humans.
The day before, I had reserved locker number 30. Apparently, I didn't close it properly. The next day I was supposed to use locker 31, but I saw 30 open and, being careless, didn't notice that it wasn't the one assigned to me.
So I put everything in a locker that would not open again through the normal process.
Inside were my phone and my keys. In other words, almost my entire ability to function outside that building.
At 10 a.m. the next day, the owner came to the site. Without the police, who she had threatened to call the day before. At some point, she decided to trust me and came prepared to open the locker.
That was when we discovered that the management system had a bug.
After a few attempts, we opened the locker with a key. A regular key. Metal, old-fashioned, and completely uninterested in whether the software considered the situation possible.
A happy ending, although only halfway happy. I spent a few very uncomfortable hours waiting, explaining, and wondering whether I might somehow be accused of stealing my own belongings.
But I didn't lose my phone or my keys.
Technology doesn't always fail dramatically. Nothing explodes. The lights don't go out. Sometimes it simply leaves you locked out of your own things while a system designed to prevent exactly that keeps insisting that everything is working perfectly.
The problem, of course, always seems to be somewhere between the screen and the chair.
In this case, it was probably somewhere between lockers 30 and 31, and in software that had not considered the possibility that a human being might choose the wrong door.
I'll tell you another day how I got into the house afterwards, or how I ended up making a friend on a staircase.