I have been doing this weird thing with my automatic car door lock on my keychain. I live in Quincy, Massachusetts and I have a parking space in my driveway, which is on the side of the house. I get pretty neurotic about stuff sometimes and I usually lock my car by pressing the automatic lock on the car door on the way out. But by the time I am 4 steps away from the car I am on such autopilot that I forget if I had actually locked the car from the inside. So I press the automatic lock on my keychain. My car doesn’t actually beep to let me know it’s locked so I might even press it twice just to be sure. It’s such a short walk to the front door of my house that by the time I am at the door I have just finished locking the car. So my finger is still on the automatic car lock. So I look at the lock to my house door, and you guessed it, I press the unlock button for the automatic car lock expecting my house to unlock. Now, the first time I did this I immediately realized it and laughed hysterically. I actually tried to unlock my house with my automatic car lock! This takes the cake for ‘autopilot action of the year’.

Except when I did it again. And again. And when I pressed the automatic unlock to the car and my house didn’t unlock I actually wondered why it didn’t unlock for a second. And I did this two separate times . Wow. Is this what getting old is like? I think so. The worst part is I started making excuses as to why I did this. It’s clear that there were other things on my mind. Like I was walking and thinking about other things, and I couldn’t be bothered with thinking about how getting into my house works, like with a key. It’s the same thing as Socrates being spotted several times ‘thinking’ in the center of town, not moving, just thinking, staring into the sky, not worried about what was around him, or about any of those practical things in life. He was thinking about the meaning of life and stuff, and he was known as a genius, just like me! Ha.

Or I might get defiant and be like “house doors should unlock like that anyway! What? Do we live in the dark ages??”. Why should people have to fumble around with a key in the middle of winter? This is unfair to the owner of the house! I mean, the reason I was trying to remotely unlock my house is because that is the way it actually should be. I can think of a few good perks to having the remote lock for your house besides the freezing winter example. You know how you might have to get your girlfriend or mother in law a key to your apartment or house? With a traditional lock you don’t have much of a good excuse because making a copy of a key is pretty inexpensive and you can do it at the local hardware store. Damn it, you might think. There is nothing I can do to make this not happen.

Maybe you want to have the freedom to roam around the house naked and not have to worry about being snuck up upon. Or you want to be able to rip those huge smelly farts and not have to worry about having someone coming in abruptly and smelling your filth. But with a remote lock things get a bit more complicated. Say your girlfriend or mother in law asks you for a key. Well now your key is computerized and has to be requested from a dealer of sorts. And you know that it’s going to cost some serious money, all those remote locking systems do. So basically your girlfriend or mother in law will think twice about asking you to spend $300 just so they can get in your apartment, or house, whenever they feel like it. I think knocking will suffice when we are talking about that kind of cake. Unless of course your mother in law or girlfriend is not trusting and crazy, in which case this is a sign they shouldn’t have a key anyway. I mean a relationship is built upon trust, and that is something you can say in order to avoid buying the expensive key. See, it’s a good idea! And that’s probably why I tried to unlock my house with my remote locking system that is used for my car… yeah… right.