Without a doubt our busiest night is Friday night. So many people venture out on the town for adventure in Melbourne on Friday night that ends in a lost key calamity. Of course the main ingredient in these cases is alcohol. Whether it is dropping keys down the drain whilst fumbling them out of pocket, leaving them behind who knows where or in some cases simply not taking them out your flatmate would be home only to discover said flatmate is having their own Friday night adventure. Whatever the reason we know from experience to make sure we are well staffed Friday nights.
Our locksmiths are all well trained, industry accredited, are all subjected to criminal history checks and must pass the Toplock always polite and helpful test. As locksmiths working the late shift almost anything can and does happen. And one Friday night in Carlton everything happened.
With received a call at 3.30 in the a.m. on Saturday morning from a very inebriated young lady in Carlton who had locked herself out of her apartment. She was desperate for us to make a speedy arrival because she was busting to go to the toilet. One of our vans race to the scene only to find our potential client was now asleep… Or perhaps she would be better described as being unconscious on the front doorstep. There was evidence that she had remedied her earlier emergency in the driveway… but now we were left with a new dilemma.
Our potential new client was proving very difficult to awaken. Without her instructions that this indeed was her house we couldn’t begin to arrange an entry. Even if we had been able to legally enter the premises we were left with the moral dilemma of leaving someone so inebriated to their own devices. It certainly wasn’t an option to simply leave her on her front porch which was very visible from the street.
We made a call to the boys in blue who were on the scene pretty fast. Whilst they were not overly impressed with the callout it was not the first time they’d been called out to such a scene. They tried for a few moments to awaken the young lady and were just about to call for an ambulance when she opened her eyes and started mumbling about why were the police pulling her over for a breath test when all she was doing was sleeping on front porch. She lay back down and tried to go back to sleep.
When she realised there were two big coppers, a locksmith and also a small crowd watching her she regained a small amount of sobriety quick smart, was able to produce ID showing she was the resident … we unlocked the front door and flopped on the couch, face down. Our guy said his goodbyes to an already snoring customer and locked the door on his way out.
It is one of those situations that looking back we can laugh at but at the time it was very serious. We are locksmiths not paramedics yet we had a duty of care to this customer to ensure her safety.
A couple of days later we received a phone call from the young lass questioning our invoice. She had completely failed to remember that she contacted us and that we had let her inside. Luckily at the time the locksmith on duty realised her drunken signature might not withstand her scrutiny in the cold sober light of day if the invoice was ever questioned so he took a couple of selfies of him entering the property and got cards from the police officers to verify that he had done the work.
In the end she went from pretty annoyed that some locksmith was sending her a bill for work not done…. too grateful that we had calmly and diligently sorted her out of her predicament when she was in no state to do so herself.
Once again TopLock saves the day
