I have a keybox mounted in the wall in my secret room. Yes, I built a secret room in my house, because during one of my many excursions into the attic, I noticed an area that didn’t have a ceiling, and there was a bunch of wasted space. So I built it in, utilizing it for something cool. There’s nothing big in there, just my guns and some dirty magazines. You know, the usual. And my keybox. Now this is an American Security Company keybox, mounted between the studs, in my secret room. I have a buddy who works for ASC, so I get a pretty fair discount on their fine products. This keybox is stronger than – well, stronger than something pretty strong. You couldn’t pry it open with a crowbar and a sledgehammer, unless you wanted to.

Anyway, it’s mounted with the lock side right up against a brick wall, so there’s no room to pry it anyway. My point in all this is that you can’t get into that son of a bitch unless you have some dynamite and just a stupid desire to get at my keys. You know, it’d be easier to just steal my car. You know, without the key. Okay, so I’ve told you about the keybox.

Now enter my gun safe. Well, it’s not a gun safe as such. It’s just one of those pizza box ones that slides under your bed or in the bottom of a drawer that has a push-button combination that triggers a spring-loaded door. It’s also made by ASC. There’s no getting it open without the combination. Unless you have the bypass key.

The bypass key, is, of course, in my keybox, locked up, where it belongs. Duh. But here’s the tricky part. The master key to my keybox is in my quick access gunsafe. So my thought here is that if I need to get into my keybox, I just key in my quick nine-digit code, the gunsafe pops open, I grab the key, and I’m set. But what about when the batteries have failed?

Yeah, the combination part of the gunsafe is powered by eight AA batteries. It doesn’t warn you when they’re getting low. So they just sort of die unexpectedly. You can key in the code, but it isn’t powerful enough to pull the release lever all the way, and you’re stuck outside the safe. What do you do in these situations? Well, it’s simple. You open the keybox, get the gunsafe key, and open the gunsafe. And how do you get the keybox key? You pop open the gunsafe.

So I spent several hours last night reasoning with myself about how I became so stupid to rely on a battery-powered device for my security. And I tried to devise a plan that involved somehow getting the key out, without actually needing a key from the box the key for the safe was in so I could open the safe and get the key to open the box and get the key for the safe.

I just about went crazy. Why, you ask, would I store a key in a battery-powered safe that had the potential to trap me out of all my safes? I can’t answer that, friend. Alls I know is that now I have two useless safes, one hard-mounted in my wall, and the other with a locked and loaded pistol in it – both of which I cannot open. Sigh.