Ron: “You’ve only got 5 more days that you have to be good.”
Ollie, in a wail: “But the day after Christmas, Santa’s already watching for next year!”
Evie, singing: “…this land is made for you and me!”
Ollie: “…and everybody else!”
Sara: “Well, there’s our little Socialist.”
Ollie: “What if you threw a pokeball up at God, and trapped God in a pokeball?”
More of a spiritualist, then, I guess.
Sorry folks, Christmas is canceled this year. 😦
If you haven’t been following along with my lock story, you only need to know two things:
Since I did ultimately find the combination to the lock, I’ve kind of been coasting to victory here, just imagining Ollie’s face on Christmas morning when he gets the combination. All the hard work, finally paying off.
Welp, it was good while it lasted.
When we first figured out the combination, we realized it must have come from the school. “Do you think we should return it?” I asked. “No,” said Sara, “it’s been missing at least two months, surely they’ve replaced it by now.” Well, they hadn’t, and they wanted it back. Sara mentioned the story to Ollie’s teacher, who informed us in no uncertain terms that the lock is the property of the school and needs to be returned by Friday.
This was obviously pretty upsetting to me. I just had this whole magical moment built up in my head, and it was really hard to watch that die. I know returning the lock is the right thing to do, and knowing that, I have no choice but to do it.
Ollie says he found the lock in the park across the street from the school. It’s not lost on me that it’s entirely possible that he took it from the school, knew he was doing the wrong thing, and lied about where he found it. He is 5 after all. And in that case, forcing him to return it is unquestionably the right thing to do (and really, returning something that someone lost is unquestionably the right thing to do in the first place).
On the other hand, it is certainly within the realm of possibility that he found it somewhere else, or forgot where he found it, or did some other thing a 5 year old might do that was not intentionally malicious. And really, if a 5 year old finds a dirty lock on the ground, even if it’s at school on the playground, it probably looks like a thing that’s okay to take (here in Chicago we find all kinds of weird things on the ground all the time).
I just wish there was a way to teach him a lesson about honesty and responsibility without sacrificing his most precious possession.
Of course I could buy him a new lock, but honestly, I don’t think he cares about locks. He doesn’t like this lock because he’s really into locks, he likes it because he found it, and it’s his. I thought instead about buying the school a new lock, and rush-shipping it so it could be here by the end of the week.
Instead, I decided to cut out his little heart so he could learn a lesson about honesty, responsibility, and never caring about anything until you are a cold, heartless, nihilist with nothing to live for and nobody to hold you down.
Sara composed the following letter and we mailed it to Ollie:
Naturally, the mail did not arrive on time, and we had to print a second, black and white copy and slip it in with the rest of the mail.
Ollie took it about how I expected. He was VERY VERY excited to get the combination, and spent about 15 minutes just locking it on things and unlocking it. “Now it’s locked on the crate! Now it’s locked on the toilet paper!”
He is obviously reluctant to return it, but I *think* he’s going to actually do it. He seemed sort of resigned to his fate. I can’t blame him for not being excited about it, but I’m proud of him for doing it (even if it was under an implied threat from Santa).
So I think Santa may end up getting a lock for him after all. Now I just have to remember to snag the copy Santa mailed before he sees it.
We might not be completely out of the woods yet. “I’m going to try the combination on all of the locks at school and see if it works!” he said right away, and also “I’m going to tell [my friend] at school the combination!” So, uh…returning the lock may come back to bite the school a little bit.
I didn’t expect this to be so complicated.
Okay, so based on the reaction to yesterday’s post, ya’ll are apparently too busy to do your own Internet sleuthing and figure out how to crack a lock (even though it probably would have taken you about as long as it took to write comments to me about it!)
I don’t know if this works for every lock, or only the specific lock I had. But it’s easy enough to try, so you might as well give it a go. Note that this is specifically for the kind of lock pictured below, with 4 dials for the digits of the combination:
Okay, so, are you ready? It’s so simple.
Pull on the shackle of the lock as if you were trying to tug it open, and hold it that way. Try to turn the first dial. You will notice that it won’t be able to move very much as long as you hold the pressure on the shackle.
Now release the pressure on the shackle and flip to the next number. Again pull on the shackle tight and try to move the digit. Again, it shouldn’t move much. Keep doing this until you have tried every number on the first dial. You will notice one of the numbers moves noticeably more than the others…this is the first digit of the combination.
It is seriously that easy.
Continue until you have all 4 digits of the combination. This will be a maximum of 40 possible combinations (10 tries on each of 4 dials), rather than the full 10,000 combinations it would take to brute force it.
(If you have a traditional dial combination, like the one pictured below, fear not! Try the method found here instead.)
I sort of feel a little bad about putting this info out there because, short of this one VERY SPECIFIC CASE, I feel like the less people who know how to pop open locks, the better. But it really is as easy as googling “how to pick a lock”, so I guess if you can’t do that, you probably can’t find this post either.
Ollie found a padlock outside. I don’t remember exactly when it showed up; Ollie just brought it home from school, said he found when they were at the park across the street.
It’s a little bit worse for the wear, having been outside and everything, but nothing special, other than it’s pretty heavy duty. He carries it everywhere, he sleeps with it at night. I mean, there is literally nothing you can do with this lock. It’s just a big, heavy, locked…lock.
So naturally, Ollie has fallen in love with it.
For the past month or so, whenever we ask Ollie what he wants for Christmas, he says, “The combination to my lock.” It is the ONLY THING HE WANTS. “That’s impossible, buddy,” I say. “There’s no way to find out the combination.” “Santa can find out the combination,” he stubbornly insists.
I mean, I wouldn’t feel so bad about it if he wanted *anything* else. But for months, consistently, the ONLY THING HE WANTS.
“You know,” said Sara, with all the aplomb of someone who is suggesting someone else do something that she herself would never actually do, “If you could check 4 combinations per minute, it would only take 40 hours to check all the possible combinations…”
Grandpa took the first shift. “You can do WAY more than 4 combinations a minute,” he said, and proceeded to try the first 2000 combinations over the weekend.
Now, at this point I started to get a little excited. Only 8000 more possible combinations, and most likely the combination would be somewhere in the middle anyway. I could check them every day while on the train, find the combination, and return the lock before Ollie realized it was gone. Come Christmas, Santa slips the combination into his stocking and we have the most MAGICAL CHRISTMAS EVER! Ollie will believe until he’s 32.
So away I went. I could get between 500 and 700 combos checked per train ride, depending on if I caught the express or not. I knocked out like 2000 additional one night while watching Mad Max. Unfortunately, I couldn’t use my wrist for like 2 days afterwards, so I’m not sure that actually put me ahead, but still.
Naturally, it was totally worth it because as soon as I solved that combination, all the hard work would pay off and it would be the most MAGICAL CHRISTMAS EVER!
When I got to the 9000th combination, I said to myself, “That’s okay. No worries. That just means the first number is 9, that’s all.” “What are the odds it’s in the last few numbers?” asked Sara. “100%”, I said confidently. “I’ve checked all the other numbers, so I know for a fact it has to be in the last few numbers.”
In reality, though, I was not feeling so confident. Every number that went by I was more sure I had missed it somehow. Imagine if the first digit wasn’t lined up just perfectly; that entire 1000 tries would have been invalidated. For all I know, this stupid rusty lock had a broken mechanism.
When I finally got to 9999, I was…disappointed to say the least. It really was quite a lot of work, which I was happy to do, assuming that it actually resulted in learning the combination. But, since it hadn’t…
You can find anything on youtube, including thousands of videos on how to pick a lock. Now, to be clear, picking the lock wasn’t really useful in my case: I didn’t just need to get the lock open, I needed to actually have the combination. So up until that point I hadn’t gone down that road, but I was really at rock bottom here. Maybe I could pop it open, and then somehow reset the combination (which I can say now is definitely not something you can do, but honestly I probably wasn’t in my right mind at that point.)
You can find anything on youtube. Seriously. I watched a series of videos of people picking my specific model of lock in under 30 seconds. One guy did it with a paperclip. Easy breezy. I could totally do this.
I totally could not do it, and I broke the paperclip off inside the lock. The most magical Christmas ever was getting farther away by the minute. Santa was going to be an utter failure, Christmas would be ruined, and Ollie would probably end up riding the rails, bitter and alone, just another disillusioned hobo, drunk, depressed, and cursing God Santa.
I kept at it. I learned so much about picking locks, you guys. I examined cutaway diagrams of locks, learned where to buy lock picking tools, or even how to make them in a pinch.
And then I found it: the post to end all posts. It gave me a technique so simple and easy, requiring no tools at all, that honestly I’m not sure why we even bother to lock things. Less than 5 minutes and I had the combo.
Man, I sure wish I had looked up how to do that before I spent all those hours brute-forcing the combination. Oh well, who cares. The
MOST
MAGICAL
CHRISTMAS
EVER
was back on, baby!
Now that I can open it, I can see that I undoubtedly wasn’t tugging hard enough when I was checking the combos. On the other hand, if I actually did fully check each number, it would have taken too long and I never would have checked them all. Either way, in hindsight, I can see my brute-force method never would have actually worked.
I called Sara up to tell her I had cracked it. “It’s weird, though,” I said. “It’s a strangely round number.” “Wait, you mean the combination is the address of the kids’ school??”
Guess we know where the lock came from.
“Oliver, if you don’t get in here right now and take care of these, I’m calling Santa!”
That’s right, I went there.
As soon as I said it, I was kind of cursing myself for not saying “email Santa” – I certainly could have gotten away with that one – but what’s done is done.
A few minutes later, I heard Ollie in the other room talking to Sara. “What’s Santa’s phone number?” he asked, innocently. Without missing a beat, Sara said, “Well, I think it is 1-800-NORTH-POLE, but I’m not sure.” “Oh,” said Ollie, glumly realizing my story checked out.
Parenting high five!
Ollie: “At school, all of the kids have an elf on the shelf. It watches them and tells Santa when they’re naughty. Please don’t get an elf on the shelf! Santa can’t watch everyone all the time, but if you have an elf at your house, it can.”
Ollie, on further reflection: “…but when I have kids, THEN I’ll get an elf on the shelf.”
Shane Halbach 