You can't make this shit up.

A couple weeks ago, before Texas decided to play dress-up and act like it was fucking North Dakota, we were sitting at home watching TV one night at maybe 11 o’clock, when we heard someone pounding on our neighbor’s door and shouting “police!” Why this has happened more than once in the past six months, I have no idea, but this time, the voice sounded less like it belonged to the SWAT team, and more like it belonged to a seven-year-old, which actually turned out to be true.

Up until this point, we weren’t really certain that we still had a neighbor, as we hadn’t seen her in several months. When we went outside to ask “what the fuck is going on, and could you please shut the hell up,” we found her standing out there with her younger brother, trying her key in the lock, and looking pretty pissed off. Apparently, she had her two younger brothers staying with her, one of whom was inside, and who had locked and deadbolted the door. This was before all the ice-and-snow-in-the-South bullshit started, but it was still pretty cold, so we invited them inside while they tried to figure out what to do.

They figured that the brother in the apartment was either being a bratty little shit, or that he was taking a bath, but either way, they still needed to get inside. They could have tried calling the courtesy officer, but even if he had keys to their apartment, the only way to get past the deadbolt was probably to kick the door in, so that wasn’t much help. After a few minutes, she realized that the sliding door to the balcony was unlocked, so we went out on our balcony and found ourselves looking about fifteen feet down at this:


That would totally break your legs fall.

We decided it would be fun to pretend we were in a British comedy, so our neighbor shakily climbed over the railing, with my wife holding on to one of her arms so she wouldn’t fall. She wrapped her feet through the bars and gripped the railing as tightly as she could. Then she closed her eyes and timidly tried to reach one foot across, pulled it back, put one hand on the side of the building, pulled that back, too, and said “um, shit.”

Neighbor: “It’s really far.”Us: “You can make it. Probably.”Neighbor: “I’m going to die in a bush.”

After several similar efforts, she asked my wife to hold her waist, and she somehow managed to get both hands onto the railing on her balcony, but then she pretty much froze, awkwardly bridging the gap with my wife still holding on to her. I suddenly realized that, since I was a lot taller than her, I could probably get across, so I just climbed over the railing and jumped…

Before anyone else realized what had happened, I was standing on my neighbor’s balcony, trying to figure out how I was going to walk through a dark, unfamiliar apartment and unlock the front door without scaring the shit out of an eleven-year-old. Actually, that might have been fun, but it was probably more likely that I would have had to fight off a screaming eleven-year-old who had just discovered a stranger in his apartment and grabbed a baseball bat or something. It turned out to be kind of anticlimactic, though, as he was asleep in the living room with the TV blaring. Incidentally, the deadbolt wasn’t even actually locked.

I’m not really sure how or why this shit always happens to me, but I’m totally adding this to my résumé, because it’s probably going to come up in an interview someday.