Hello! This weekend I had the unfortunate pleasure of experiencing something that I never had before – locking my keys in the car.
How did this happen? You may ask.
Don’t you have a spare? You may also ask.
Doesn’t your car have locking/unlocking capabilities from an app? You may also, also ask.
Well, I will start by answering your first question.
How did this happen?
Picture this – It is Christmas morning, you loaded the gifts in your car the night before thinking you were being proactive and making your life easier for the morning (HA). Your family is just about to leave to celebrate Christmas with your in-laws. You and your husband have to drive separately because he works in 2 hours (boo). Before settling your tot in the car, you throw your diaper bag in the passenger seat, and close the door.
Something beeps – what was that? Hmm, I don’t know.
Then you try to open up the car door to put your child in and.. It won’t open.
You try all the other doors, and, oh no, they won’t open either.
You flag your husband down just in time before he pulls out of the driveway to tell him the bad news.
No one can figure out how the car locked, especially with an electric key fob that isn’t supposed to allow the doors to lock with the key inside. All of your belongings are in there – your phone, your wallet, all of your tot’s essentials for the day, and… the gifts!
It’s OK, just get your spare!
What a great idea! Except, my husband misplaced it months ago! Great! Surely no one is open to help on Christmas Day.
Without our gifts in hand, we drove together and left it to figure out later. My FIL drove my kiddo and I home later to see if we could figure out any way to remedy this and to search the house for the spare key. Nothing.
Just use your car app!
Even though we have a newer vehicle and it is the middle-of-the-road trim package, our car does not come with remote start or locking/unlocking capabilities through an app. Um, that will never happen again! In my opinion, it is worth the extra money to have this feature because of what happened. What if my child had been in the car? What if we were on vacation? There were so many scenarios that ran through my head as this was happening and I am thankful it was only gifts and some personal belongings that were locked in the car. Needless to say, we will be paying for this feature with future vehicle purchases.
What now?
All was seemingly lost until I combed through my dealership paperwork and discovered we paid for extra protection and 24/7 roadside assistance. Woohoo! At least we got something right! I was able to call the roadside assistance and they said someone would be there to help in 60-90 minutes at no cost to me – halleluiah!
So what happened?
Within 60 minutes someone arrived and inflated the car door open enough to be able to poke a device inside to unlock the driver-side door. Once he successfully opened the door, I asked him, how did this happen? I have accidentally hit the lock button not realizing my keys were still in the car and my car does not allow it to lock. He said – backpacks often block the key sensors. Let me say that again. Backpacks often block the key sensors allowing your car to lock with them in there. When I threw my backpack in, it must have hit the keys just the right way to lock the doors. And since the sensor was blocked, the car didn’t recognize the keys were present inside. All the stars aligned for this one and in the worst way possible.
I am writing this post as a PSA to all moms. Please be aware of this! Although inconvenient, things turned out ok for us. It could have been much worse. Please think about and plan for what you would do in this situation.
Do you have a spare key?
How about locking/unlocking capabilities on your phone?
Or 24/7 roadside assistance?
These are things I should have thought about but because I thought the doors couldn’t lock with the keys inside, it never crossed my mind.
Luckily one of the extra features we paid for when purchasing the vehicle was free key fob replacement (which I realized while combing through the paperwork) so you can bet your buttons we will be redeeming that! Key fobs can be very expensive so these extra features we paid for are really paying for themselves (way to go past self)!
As for the gifts, I ended up making a (bad) joke by saying “Well at least I have some more time to do last-minute shopping!”. Which did actually get a laugh from the crowd. Come on, if I didn’t laugh in this situation I might have cried with all of the other Christmas pressures! Nonetheless, a great holiday was had by all, our bellies were full, and now so is our house with toys.
I hope you had a great holiday and can find some time to breathe as we make our way into the new year.
And hopefully this new year, you won’t find your keys are locked in your car!
XOXO,
Katie
