Since I’ll be heading down to Austin in a few weeks to attend the Power Architecture Developer Conference, I wanted to devote this Editorial to some conjecture about how power computing architecture would evolve to support the growing number of applications which require some level of DSP capability. Unfortunately, this was not to be. I’ve spent the last couple of hours trying put down some pithy insights about the future of instruction set extensions, hardware DSP accelerators and multi-core architectures but it seems that any coherent thoughts necessary for a real technical editorial have vanished as the prospect of heading back to the Texas capital again stirred up some funny memories from another developer event (Freescale/Motorola) a few years back where I found myself trapped, buck-naked, in the bathroom of a fancy Austin hotel.

 

Not having any formal commando training, a situation like this usually reduces me to a quivering puddle of despair and embarrassment. In fact, nobody was more surprised than me that I managed to turn the situation into a rather amusing exercise in applied creative thinking worthy of my old-time TV hero MacGyver.

 

Imagine the following as an impromptu intelligence test: you've just stepped out of the shower in your shiny hotel room, getting ready to shave, dress, and head downstairs for an important meeting. Being the casual sort of guy you are you don't usually close the bathroom door when you're alone, but your suit was a bit wrinkled when you unpacked it and you thought hanging it in the steamy confines of the shower would do it some good. You towel off, take a slurp of coffee from your mug, make a few swipes across your face with the razor, and start to head out to the bedroom to get your underpants from the dresser. It’s at this point that your cheerfully normal morning comes to a screeching halt when you turn the door knob and nothing happens. You twist harder and still nothing. You give the sucker a really mean turn and a hard yank with the same stupid results. No, there is no phone in the bathroom.

 

Now what do you do?

 

A quick assessment of my situation revealed a limited set of options:

With no sense of how long it would take for somebody to come and rescue me, limited karate skills, and several friends expecting to see me in the lobby shortly, none of these options really looked good.

 

I sat down and took another look at the situation and the resources I had to work with. Besides the usual complement of towels, hotel soaps, and lotions, a thorough inventory of the room revealed several other potentially useful assets which included:

My first escape attempt took the path of least effort and most probable success. I broke off a piece of the wire coat hanger and fashioned a small tool that would let me get between the door and the door frame and pry back the pesky bolt that was holding me hostage. This nearly worked, but after fifteen minutes of repeated tries, I determined that I could slide the bolt about halfway back into the door and then it mysteriously refused to budge a millimeter further.

 

It drove me crazy that my shoulder bag, complete with a small tool set and a cell phone lay on the bed, not a dozen feet beyond the walls I was caught behind.

 

A closer inspection of the lock assembly revealed that the doorknob had a small hole in its side where it appeared a small pin could be inserted to release it and dismantle the lock. Unfortunately, the coat hanger I had was around four times larger in diameter than the hole in the door knob. Several minutes of fruitless digging with my home made tool only scratched up the side of the doorknob and dulled the jagged edge of the wire.

 

When the frontal attack failed I tried to out-flank my metallic antagonist by driving the door hinge pins out so I could remove it and salvage what was left of the meeting going on, without me, ten floors below. I fashioned a second piece of coat hanger into a tool that I tried to pry a pin out of its hinge with. No luck. Thinking that I needed a thinner piece of metal to get under the pin's flat head, I commandeered the sheet metal face plate of a tissue dispenser mounted in the bathroom wall. All I succeeded in doing was bending the heck out of the hotel's fixture.

 

After this failed, I tried using the coat hanger-tool as a punch to try driving the hinge pin up and out, using the coffee mug wrapped in a washcloth as a somewhat fragile hammer. Another ten minutes of this produced the same results as trying to slide back the bolt.

 

Since I was not thrilled at the prospect of spending the entire morning in the bathroom, I began to consider more drastic measures that involved some level of destruction of hotel property. I'd noticed that the hole in the wall that the tissue dispenser fit into was less than an arm's length away from the door knob. I reasoned that if I removed the rest of the dispenser I could cut a small hole in the remaining piece of sheetrock and reach around to open the door from the outside. I pulled out the sheet metal dispenser body out after prying loose the two hardened drywall screws that had held it in place.

 

A third tool was fashioned from the remains of the coat hanger which I used to score the face of the sheetrock so I could create a small, neat, and easy-to-repair hole. Once the sheetrock fractured, I turned one of my disposable razors into a crude, but serviceable utility knife to cut neatly through the thick beige vinyl wallpaper on the other side.

 

Triumphantly, I reached out through the hole and grasped the outside doorknob. I turned it and pulled. Much like its interior counterpart, the knob turned freely but failed to unlock the door. Embarrassment crept over me now, as I imagined trying to explain the hotel's repair bill on my expense report. The thought of having a housekeeper walk in to find an arm sticking out of the wall also seemed a bit silly so I gave up on that escape plan.

 

It looked like time and resources were running out, and that I'd be found by the housekeeper, covered in gypsum dust and a towel. Still, I was convinced that I had at least one more option open to me -- if only I could use my imagination wisely. Suddenly, I realized what I'd have to do. I took one of the hardened drywall screws that I'd gotten from removing the tissue dispenser and used it as a hand drill to enlarge the access hole in the doorknob! A few minutes later I stuck the wire tool into the lock and popped off the doorknob. Shortly thereafter, I had dismantled the bolt mechanism, and stepped out of the bathroom as a free man.

 

Before I headed off to my meeting I took a close look at the lock that had caused me the trouble. A cursory inspection of the damaged striker plate revealed that some over-eager previous occupant had probably tried to enter the bathroom when somebody else had locked themselves inside. Their attempt to kick in the door had apparently caused the sliding bolt to disconnect from the rotating knob mechanism. This explained why both doorknobs were useless, as well as why the bolt would only pull back halfway when I tried to retract it with my improvised tool. Case closed.

 

Epilogue: Rather than being furious with me for cutting a hole in their hotel room's wall, the management seemed incredibly relieved that I had not had a fit of claustrophobia, a heart attack, or decided to sue. To my amusement, they not only gave me my 2-night stay for free, but also put me up in a suite with a wet bar, a lounge area large enough to play a game of full-court basketball in and a bedroom that wasn’t much smaller. My only regret was that Catherine wasn't there to share it with me..

 

Comments? Questions? Stories of your own ingenious escape you’d like to share? Write me at lhg at en-genius.net or post your tales of derring-do on our on blog through the link below.