Tales from an Engineer's Life #172: Tips on Self-Rescue from Hotel Bathrooms
Prologue: It's exciting to be heading to Houston next week to cover the APEC power conference from the show floor instead of from a Zoom screen. Despite the long days and short deadlines ahead, it will be be a pleasure to sit down face-to-face with industry experts and old friends for the first time since the pandemic drove us all into an isolated virtual existence two long years ago.
My preparations for APEC brought back many colorful memories of other junkets to Texas over the past 25 years, where I had the privilege of covering technical breakthroughs that changed our industry. I also had the chance to attend lavish parties, hobnobbing with high-tech celebrities like Bonnie Baker, Bob Pease, and Jack Kilby. It dredged up memories of a few of the more offbeat experiences I had in Texas, too, including the one that gave birth to the following editorial.
Sometimes having an engineering education pays off in ways your professors never imagined. Often, it's being the person at a cocktail party who can explain how blockchain technology actually works or the guy/gal who helps your friends secure their smart homes against hacking.
In other cases, such as the tale presented here, your engineering smarts can be of practical value in your own life, making a profound and positive contribution to your self-esteem, your success, and, in some cases, your survival...
To illustrate my point, let's imagine that you're on a business trip and just stepped out of the shower in your fancy hotel room. You've dried off and just need to shave and dress before you head downstairs for an important meeting.
Normally, you don't close the bathroom door when you're alone. But your suit was a bit wrinkled when you unpacked it and you thought hanging it in the steamy atmosphere would do it some good. You take a slurp of coffee from your mug, make a few swipes at your face with the razor, and prepare for another routine day on the road.
But that routine day takes a sudden detour into the Twilight Zone when you try to open the bathroom door to get your underwear off the dresser. There's a moment of disbelief when you turn the knob and nothing happens. Undaunted, you twist harder, but still nothing happens. Finally, you give the sucker a really mean turn and a hard yank with the same stupid results.
And no, there isn't a phone in the bathroom. Now, what do you do?
Just to be clear, this isn't a hypothetical "thought experiment"—it actually happened to me at a conference I attended in Austin, TX, a few years back.
Still in shock over my new reality, I briefly considered a few simple options for dealing with my situation:
- Yell for help till somebody called security.
- Draw a nice warm bath, relax, and enjoy myself until the housekeeper arrived a few hours later.
- Kick in the door with a forceful karate move I learned from watching Jean Claude Van Damme's martial arts films.
Since my actual martial arts skills are worse than pathetic, I gave up on the Van Damme method and decided to do the MacGyver—the hero of my favorite 1980s action series, who used his ingenuity, rather than violence, to triumph over evil each week—approach.
Using the problem-solving skills I learned as an engineer, I took stock of the situation to see what resources I had, and the options they might present. Other than my buck-naked body and the usual complement of towels, hotel soaps, and lotions, I had the following at my disposal:
- My suit on its wire coat hangar
- The contents of my shaving kit
- A ceramic hotel coffee mug
Escape Escapades
My first escape attempt took the path of least effort and most probable success. I broke off a piece of the wire coat hanger and fashioned a small tool that I could insert between the door and the door frame. With the tool in place, I began to ease the lock's bolt back from the striker plate, hoping to move it far enough to release the door.
This nearly worked, but after 15 minutes of repeated attempts, I determined that I could only slide the bolt about halfway back into the door before it mysteriously refused to budge a millimeter further. It drove me crazy that my shoulder bag, complete with a small toolset and a cell phone lay on the bed, not a dozen feet beyond the walls I was caught behind.
For my next attempt, I noticed that the doorknob had a small hole in its side where it appeared a small pin could be inserted to release it and dismantle the lock. Unfortunately, the coat hanger was around four times larger in diameter than the hole in the doorknob. Several minutes of fruitless digging with my homemade tool only scratched up the side of the doorknob and dulled the jagged edge of the wire.
Next, I tried to drive the hinge pins from the door hinges in hopes that would allow me to remove the door and salvage what was left of the meeting going on without me 10 floors below. I fashioned a second piece of coat hanger into a tool that I tried to get under the head of one of the two pins and pry it out of its slot. No luck.
Thinking that I needed a thinner piece of metal to get under the pin's flat head, I commandeered the sheet-metal faceplate of a tissue dispenser mounted in the bathroom wall. The only result of my ingenious plan was bending the heck out of the hotel's tissue dispenser.
After this failed, I used the coat hanger-tool as a punch to try driving the hinge pin up and out, turning the coffee mug wrapped in a washcloth into a somewhat fragile hammer. Another 10 minutes of this produced the same results as trying to slide back the bolt.
Since I was not thrilled at the prospect of spending the entire morning in the bathroom, I began to consider more drastic measures that involved some additional destruction of hotel property. I'd noticed the hole in the wall that the tissue dispenser fit into was less than an arm's length away from the doorknob. I reasoned that if I removed the rest of the dispenser, I could cut a small hole in the remaining piece of sheetrock and reach around to open the door from the outside. I pulled the sheet-metal dispenser body out after prying loose the two hardened drywall screws that had held it in place.
A third tool was fashioned from the remains of the coat hanger which I used to score the face of the sheetrock so that I could create a small, neat, and easy-to-repair hole. Once the sheetrock fractured, I turned one of my disposable razors into a crude but serviceable utility knife and used it to cut neatly through the thick beige vinyl wallpaper on the bedroom wall.
Triumphantly, I reached out through the hole, grasped the outside doorknob, turned it, and pulled. But my triumph was short-lived as I discovered that the exterior knob also turned freely and failed to unlock the door. It appeared that my time and resources were running out and it was becoming increasingly likely that, despite my efforts, I'd be found by the housekeeper, covered in gypsum dust and a towel.
Finally… Freedom
Nevertheless, after imagining how I'd have to explain the hotel's repair bill on my expense report, I resolved to look for any remaining options to free myself. After taking stock of the situation again to see if I'd overlooked something, I remembered the hardened drywall screws that I'd gotten from removing the tissue dispenser. The screw's point fit nicely into the access hole in the doorknob where I used it as a crude hand drill to enlarge the opening.
A few minutes later, I stuck a piece of coat-hanger wire through the enlarged hole and popped the doorknob off the lock mechanism. This gave me access to the bolt mechanism, which I quickly dismantled, allowing me to extract myself from the bathroom, and catch what was left of the meeting I'd agreed to attend.
Before I left, I took a closer look at the lock that had caused the trouble. A cursory inspection of the damaged striker plate revealed that some over-eager previous occupant had probably tried to enter the bathroom when somebody else had locked themselves inside. Their attempt to force the door open had apparently caused the sliding bolt to disconnect from the rotating knob mechanism. This explained why both doorknobs were useless, and why the bolt would only pull back halfway when I tried to retract it with my tool.
Summary: Escape accomplished in 55 minutes after four-and-a-half tries.
Postscript: After my meeting, my heart sank when a tall guy with a suit and an earpiece approached me, saying he was from hotel security. I wasn't sure if I'd spend the next hour or two filling out an incident report for the hotel's insurance company or wait for the police to take me away for booking.
To my surprise, however, the management was actually relieved that I didn’t have a fit of claustrophobia, a heart attack, or decided to sue. In fact, they not only refunded the cost of my two-night stay, they also put me up in their VIP suite, a luxurious two-bedroom penthouse that was large enough to play a game of full-court basketball. My only regret was that my wife, Catherine, wasn't there to share it with me.
