So when I moved into my shitty NYC apartment the first thing we noticed was that our maintenance office didn’t give us correctly cut keys which is obviously an issue although when we tried to contact them several times about it they denied that they’d given us faulty keys and insisted that we were just idiots who didn’t know how to open a lock so we shrugged and went about our day, jamming these shitty keys into a barely functional lock and performing various hacky methods several times a day that slowly wore away at the actual lock mechanism until one day a month later the lock submitted to its fate and refused to open for us which was obviously an issue and seeing as it was nearly midnight and the maintenance office was closed, our only options were to call a 24hr locksmith and pay the fees or break into our apartment and seeing as we’re all broke grad students, we went with the latter and so we went around back of the building to the fire escape only to see that it was only accessible through the first floor apartment’s “yard” which was surrounded by a wall so we voted our roommate’s bf to scale the wall and climb the fire escape now unfortunately we are idiots and forgot that yes this is NYC and maybe electing the male in a hat and baggy clothing at midnight was not the best option so our neighbors come outside with a gun and we pop out immediately like arms raised saying we’re so sorry we’re just trying to get to the fire escape because the landlord didn’t give us a functional lock/key set and they’re like why didn’t u just knock we could have killed u anyway here come inside meanwhile now the entire building has heard the commotion so another neighbor opens his window and hands us a bunch of tools through his fire escape for breaking into apartments idk why he has those but I didn’t care and so with the help of half of our building, we managed to break into my room and then immediately filed a maintenance request and idk if other neighbors pulled some strings but for the first time there was no push back from maintenance office/landlord and at 8am on the dot a guy showed up, replaced the lock, and handed us new keys and that’s the story of how I befriended all my neighbors in my new NYC apartment
