This funny story happened to me during celebration of the New Year. I celebrated the New Year with my good friend, who lives and works in Moscow, but every year comes to celebrate the New Year in Odessa. We met the New Year at the midnight and all of our company – a family of my friend, me and my wife, and all the guests went outside the apartments to arrange fireworks...

A little child of my friend have started to cry, fearing fire rockets. My friend asked his sister to go to the apartments to calm down the baby and gave her a key. But he forgot to warn his sister about he had 2 identical locks at the door, one of which is not working properly. His sister started to open faulty lock, which suddenly snapped and broke.

What should we do? I called the emergency services of opening locks. They said that this service costs $50 and we must have documents for apartment ownership. I said "What documents? We left apartments for 15 minutes and all the documents remained in the apartments behind closed doors". They replied, "Then you must have a presence of the district police officer or police patrol". I said: "Now everyone celebrates New Year and a district police officer in the same way drinking and having a party, and we would have long time to explain for the police patrol everything about this situation and deal with the formalities". So we have dropped this idea.

Then we decided to get into the apartments through the balcony - apartments are on the second floor. But the fortune has turned against us. We got to climb up onto the balcony and we were glad of our success, but suddenly it turned out that door from the balcony to the apartments was closed.

Finally, we asked for help of my friend’s neighbour and asked him to give us the scrap or hacksaw. A neighbour gave us two hacksaws and told that he had exactly the same situation and it is 2,5 hours for hack the lock. I said that there are two of us and we would get through this quickly. Also roasted duck and good wine on the table were waiting for us and this fact gave us an additional strength. After 40-45 minutes we opened the door. All this time we took turns –the first sawes, the second rests. The door lock was pretty massive, but we were in a rage and sawed it into 2 parts.

Click on image to enlarge

When we went back to the apartments, we sat down and continued to celebrate, we smiled remembering that situation, but first, of course, we were not laughing.