Pick Me

You know those niggling desires you have in nether regions of your mind? Those thoughts that pop up now and again until you put them to bed by doing the thing or somehow exorcising it.

Well for a while I've had one such thought and it's been about picking locks. I wouldn't say I've been fascinated by the topic, more that I've had a medium level of interest, a bit like a Madras curry to most Brits.

It's not even that I've considered shifting my career into burglary, merely a rumbling of a thought that it would be a nice and mostly useless thing to be able to do.

So of course, a few weeks ago I bought myself a "learn how to pick locks" kit online. It wasn't very expensive and the blurb promised me an extensive easy to understand written guide, two real locks made from transparent plastic to practice on as well as a sexy little tool kit with all the things an aspiring lock picker might need.

The package arrived. Somewhat ironically I found it quite hard to open, but once I dealt with that hurdle I got on with reading the guide. I'm that rare breed; a man who likes to read instructions before I start to play with the hardware.

At this point I realised that the instructions were most likely a literal translation from Chinese. Not only was the language nigh on impossible to figure out but I suspect it was running from back to front pagewise. I'm not one to be beaten easily, except when I give up, so I got on with things, trying my best to decipher the text, flick from page to page quickly and then start on the practical side.

The first half hour or so was a painful struggle. I'd translated sufficiently to figure out roughly what I needed to do with one padlock, but the instructions gave me very little idea of which actual tools to use out of the quite large number supplied. After much trial and error, mostly the latter, I got to a stage where I could open the padlock within around 30 - 50 seconds. I was quite pleased with this, even though it involved two tools and a little bit of brute force occasionally. I resolved to practice a bit every day before trying it out in a bank on my front door lock.

And so I did. For the next week or so I spent a small chunk of time every day working on my skills and I'm happy to tell you that, should the need arise, I can comfortably break open a clear plastic padlock, as long as I have the toolkit and some reading glasses with me, within about 10 seconds.

My mind evolved to the inevitable and I reckoned I was ready to try a real lock; one that isn't transparent and that has a door or similar attached to it. I had already put some thought into which specific lock would be my first real world attempt and had realised the only two options were my own front door or my neighbour's.

I suppose I'm old fashioned, or perhaps my neighbour is, but I figured he wouldn't be too impressed if he caught me practicing on his front door. There are not many ways I could think of to explain this one away and the truth seemed the worst idea. So last Thursday, whilst doing that 'working from home' thing that you kids do all the time, I went for it on my own front door.

I got the lock picking kit out, lay everything out on the floor, opened my front door fully, so to any passer by it would hopefully look like I was doing work on my door, and set to work. Confidence was oozing out of all my pores. After all if I can pick a clear teaching padlock in a few seconds every time surely half an hour, perhaps an hour for the virgin flight, would be wholly achievable.

Like fuck was it.

I tried every combination of tools. There are usually two involved; one to twist the twisting bit and the other to wiggle and move the wiggling bits, and I tried them all. Nothing, I mean sweet FA, I mean absofuckinglutely nothing, would budge even a fraction of a millimeter.

I kept at it for some time, maybe half an hour,  but nothing made any difference. As I told you earlier, I'm not one to be beaten easily, except when I give up. So I gave up. I reckon that's the end of my lockpicking career. If I'm honest the signs were there right at the beginning when I had such a struggle opening the package in the first place.

I'm just unsure if the career is fully over or whether it's a mere hiatus while I gather my thoughts, perhaps retrain. Hmmm....