The curse of having very formidable padlocks is that they not only keep unauthorized people out, they also keep others from going in if things don't work out the way they should. Story begins last night after being left alone late at night trying to submit the first strip to the US via email (darn Yahoo! mail keeps bringing me back to the log-in page after every excruciating wait to attach the drawing). I broke one key which I thought opened one padlock, I shrugged it off and brought the padlock and the broken key home. Fast forward to this morning when I gave the key and explained everything to my assistant who usually comes in first to open the shop. Assistant goes back to get the broken key after finding out that the one he has fails to open the others. I told him he should bring some pliers so he could open it without any hitch. I thought he understood everything so I left him alone. Big mistake.

There was a big confusion when I got to the shop, it wasn't open and my assistant was nowhere to be found. Turns out he didn't follow my instructions and even lost the broken key. We had to spend a couple hours more standing around and calling people on the phone asking for copies of the key and having our maintenance man come over to try and shatter the padlock. After trying to saw it off, he used a small mallet (almost breaking a finger in the process), finally he used an electric driver (more like a small circular saw) effectively cutting off the metal arc of the lock. Sheesh! Why didn't we think of that earlier? After spending, like, more than three hours of our time trying to break the lock.