Call Me MacGyver

*Edited for spelling mistakes, mobile formatting

As I am writing this post, it has been around an hour since the events that took place within this tale.

It is Tuesday morning at 1am, all my remaining arrivals are checked in and the night is quiet and dead. Being the industrious sort, I decide to get a head start on my night audit processes.

The final step in the night audit processes is to swap the backup tapes in our server room to ensure accurately backed up information for that business day, something I'm sure many of us fellow night owls have to do. Thinking it would just be another step, I pause my D&D video on my phone, leave the front desk with my phone still set up in its optimal viewing position at the desk, and go to our server room to perform this swap.

Now something to know about my current property... As I have not posted anything on here in a while, I am currently at an 11 week old property that still has various issues that arise when we least expect them, ranging from outlets not working to rooms getting flooded with rain water that pours down from the ceiling. I, having not experienced anything bad happen recently, should have been on guard for something bad to happen.

Anyway, I go down our first floor hallway to our HK room, go into the Utility room which had various boilers and other things that regulated the water and sewage in the hotel, which is then a quick right into the actual server room. Normally, meaning 'since the property opened', there was a plank of wood positioned between the server door and the door frame to keep it open. I always thought this was for conveniences sake and didn't think much of it. This time around though, the plank was gone and I had to use one of the keys to open it up. Not a big deal, maybe someone shut it whilst they were moving things.

I enter the room, let the door shut behind me, swapped the tapes, and went to open the door.

It wouldn't fucking open.

Seconds later, it hit me. I was locked in the server room. With no phone. No immediate way out. Except... inside of this server room was also the Fire Alarm box which connected to and controlled all other fire alarms through the whole building. The initial thought that ran through my head was 'Well, the FOM is staying on site tonight, if I set it off and wait, surely she'll have to come looking for me when she sees the desk left unattended.' But then I thought of all the complaints, angry guests, and the actual fire company I would have had to deal with by telling them I set off our alarm because I was locked in the room. THAT was not gonna happen, that was too easy and would lead to severe repercussions.

Next few minutes I tried the usual things one would try in an initial panicked state. Jimmy the door handle (too new for something like that), break the door in (it was a steel door, not happening). I then took a close look at the door handle itself and got an idea. If I couldn't break it down, I could DISMANTLE it!

Being a shrewd and clever mind, I got to work collecting any little bits I could find in the room. I used my lighter that I had on me to melt down zip ties in the room and molded the melted plastic to fit the bullshit hexagon-shaped screws on the front panel and screwed them off. Taking off the panel, I then had to deal with four very tightly screwed in philips head screws and had to resort to something stronger than zip tie plastic. Spares keys in the fire alarm box? Too thick. Metal safety strip on my lighter? Too thin. Finally I saw them, extra metal fastenings used to organize the forest of wires in the room. I was able to bend them in such a way and get a sharp enough tip that I was able to fit them into the screws, and with enough torque, unscrew the screws.

After an hour and a half roughly of MacGyvering my way to victory, I ripped the door handle off the door, kicked the door open, and shouted in victory.

There is now a large, bold-lettered sign on that door that says "DO NOT CLOSE THIS DOOR UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Tldr: Dude doesn't bring his phone along with him to do a simple task, gets locked in a room for an hour and a half, turns into a genius and gets out.