The thrice-aborted Panana City dive trip

did not start off well at all. Friday morning, after I had packed all my diving gear, clothes and everything else that I thought I might need for the weekend into the car, I headed to the office for a few hours of work. However, on the way, I stopped at a neighbor's house to drop off some Homeowners' Association paperwork. I hopped out of the car to put the envelope into her mailbox and left the car running, but as I was closing the mailbox, I heard the car door swing shut. "What I think might have just happened better not have happened," I thought, but sure enough, when I came around to the driver's side, I found that, in fact, I was locked out of my car, with the keys still in the ignition, the engine running, my cell phone on the dashboard, and my luggage in the back.

What to do? I tried all of the doors and they were all locked. I tried jimmying the windows and the doors, but the security was pretty good - I couldn't get into the locked car. I could easily have walked home to get my backup set of car keys, but the house was all locked up for the weekend, and I would have had to break in to enter. Alternately, I could have broken a car window, so the choice seemed to be between breaking glass in the car and breaking glass at the house.

Fortunately, I had to do neither. Up the block, a minibus had pulled over to the side of the road. I think the driver was looking to take a quick nap between runs, but he allowed me to use his cell phone. I dialed 411 and told the operator I needed a locksmith in the Howell Mill Road area. She connected me with one shop, who told me that it would be over an hour before he could make it to me, and when I tried to paint the picture for him (I was standing on the roadside next to a locked, running car), he gave me the number of another locksmith in the area. I called the second number, and although he initially referred me back to the first locksmith, since the first shop was closer to my car, he finally agreed to come right over, although he did say it would still take him about 20 minutes.

While I was waiting, the neighbor, to whom I was dropping off the paperwork, came walking by (she had been out jogging) and was understandably concerned to see a strange man leaning against a running car in front of her house. However, after we made our introductions, she expressed her sympathy for my situation and talked to me for a while. Unfortunately, she had been the victim of a recent robbery at her house. It seems that on a recent night, while she was parking her car, a thief slipped in to the open garage behind her and hid behind a trash can until she went into the house. After she had gone to bed, the thief slipped into the house through an adjoining door, grabbed her pocketbook from the kitchen counter and ran out, setting off the burglar alarm (it hadn't gone off earlier because he had followed her into the garage). Once she had realized what had happened, she called the police, who later found her pocketbook in a nearby park, and her credit cards, checkbook, etc. scattered all over the area. The thief had taken her cash, but discarded everything else. He still hadn't been caught as far as she knew.

Well, that didn't comfort me much as I stood by my locked but still-running car. She went on, however, almost ranting, about all of the break-ins and crime in the area. She recounted stories of car keys taken from houses in broad daylight to steal the vehicles, lookout crews watching for residents leaving for work and then looting the homes, and various other breakings-and-enterings. "Every house in this entire neighborhood has been hit at least once, if not more," she said, leaving me to wonder if she was just the over-reacting victim of a recent burglary, or if I had really moved into a major crime zone. "I'm buying a gun," she announced. I was actually relieved when the locksmith finally arrived, but as an ounce of precaution, I hired him to re-key all my locks and provide a few other security upgrades for my house after he successfully opened the passenger side door (at a cost of $60 - ka-ching!).

I finally got to work around 10 o'clock, and had to leave by 1:00 in order to meet Bill, the captain of the boat I would be diving from, for the long drive down to Panama City Beach. However, while driving over to the unsellable condo in Vinings, the designated rendez-vous spot for Captain Bill, I rolled the driver's side window down, and found to my enormous disappointment that it wouldn't go back up again. My immediate suspicion was that the locksmith had done something that busted the window mechanism as he broke into the car, but that didn't make any sense since he had entered from the passenger side, and it was the driver's side window that was stuck open.

I didn't want to leave the window open all weekend out of concern about 1.) the weather and 2.) crime, especially after my neighbor's stories (even though I was going to leave the car at the UCV and not in Collier Hills, there was still a history of automobile break-ins in the condo complex). I tried every way I could think of to get the window back up, from repeatedly switching the control button from the "up" position to the "down" and back again to pulling it up with my bare fingers, but it wouldn't respond.

Since I still had a few minutes left before I was supposed to meet Captain Bill, I quickly drove over to a Goodyear dealer, the nearest mechanic, and explained my dilemma - I needed to get the window closed before I met someone in about 15 minutes, so could I get some help not necessarily fixing the window, but at least securing it for the weekend? However, I think the person at the counter thought I was just trying to avoid paying hourly mechanic fees, and said "No way, can't help you. We'd have to take the door apart and that simply can't be done in 15 minutes. Sorry." I asked how long he thought it would take, and he estimated "a couple of hours," in a tone that implied "don't let the door hit your ass on the way out."

So, I slowly started to realize that I now had a situation on my hands that would take the rest of the afternoon to deal with (although not at that mechanic), and that I wouldn't be able to drive to Panama City Beach with Captain Bill. In fact, I probably couldn't go diving at all this weekend, unless I wanted to leave the driver's window open (which I didn't) or drive down alone that night or the next morning. So, reluctantly, I called Captain Bill and told him that due to the present unfortunate situation, I looked like the thrice-aborted trip finally had to be terminally aborted, at least for me.

As it turned out, though, Captain Bill was not far at all from where I was calling, and suggested that he swing by with his tool kit to see if together we couldn't figure out a way to fix the window. We met, and using pliers, vice grips, and screwdrivers, managed to pry the window up into a closed position, and duct-tape it shut. I then parked the car at the UCV, loaded my luggage into Captain Bill's pickup, and off we went, finally, for the five-hour drive down to Panama City.