37. The family who always locked every single door in the house.
“I had a friend who would never let me come over to his house. I didn’t know why because I’d met his mother and father and knew his siblings and they seemed like a very happy normal family and they had a nice home which I’d see often from the outside and inside through the living room window a couple times. One time however I managed to convince him to ask his mother if we could have a sleep over and she said yes. After a few moments of being there I realized why he was reluctant to let anyone over.
There were locks on every single door in the house. But not only that, every door required a different key and there was a set of keys for each door for each member of the six-person family. In the entrance hall alone there must have been 30 keys on a rack.
To give one short example of how to get to the Bathroom from the Living Room and back again, you would have to:
Take Living Room – Entrance Hall key from its specific place in the Living Room.
Unlock the Entrance Hall door. Go through then lock the door behind you.
Store the Living Room – Entrance Hall key in its specific place in the Entrance Hall.
Take Bathroom key from its specific place in the Entrance Hall.
Unlock the Bathroom door. Go through then lock the door behind you.
Unlock the Bathroom door. Go through then lock the door behind you.
Store the Bathroom door key in its specific place in the Entrance Hall.
Take the Living Room – Entrance Hall key from its specific place in the Entrance Hall.
Unlock the Living Room door. Go through then lock the door behind you.
Place the Living Room – Entrance Hall key in its specific place in the living room.
Every. Single. Time. And it was a large house. Sometimes requiring going through 3 or 4 doors to reach the room you wanted.
It honestly felt like I was playing real-life Resident Evil, collecting keys to open doors to progress. My friend was the only one who found it slightly embarrassing his sisters and brother and parents didn’t seem to think it was odd at all. I asked my friend why it was like that and he just said his mother thought it was safer for them all that way. I never stayed over again and all sleepovers after that were conducted at my house.”
