The Malfunctioning Door

MORNING OF AUGUST 27, 2010

I was staying at a hotel with my parents. I remember the three of us driving up to the parking deck after being out-and-about with whatever activities. The entrance to the parking deck was blocked with a huge, iron door featuring a yellow and black striped "warning/danger" pattern in chipped paint.

You had to swipe your hotel card in order to make the iron door slowly rise to permit entrance. For some reason the swipe was on the passenger side, and my mom was trying to make it work. Upon some swipes the door would not respond at all, and on other swipes it might make some sort of lurching, half-response, but it never opened.

Eventually we swiped the card so many times that the door began to malfunction. It would raise halfway up, then go back down, then halfway up, and so on and so forth. All the while it was making a hideous grinding noise. It seemed as though it would fall to pieces, if not explode, at any moment.

To have apparently broken/malfunctioned this huge door mortified my parents, but for some reason I thought it was so funny. I laughed and laughed as they drove away and parked in some other, distant location. As we walked the long trek back towards the hotel, I saw a crowd--including the fire department--gathering around the malfunctioning door.