I took my work keys home with me last night to see if I had the key for my display case on the ring.

I didn’t.

I searched around my house again in a fruitless effort to recover the damn thing, but I couldn’t find that key if my life depended on it. It is officially gone. Enter the locksmith.

I called one of those 24-hour places just to price stuff out. Turned out I had two options - either I could have them come to my place and make a key for the display case at a cost of $85 - $125, or I could take the display case to them and they could make a key for $25 - $35.

No way was I paying $85+ for a new damn key. But it was also equally unlikely that I could get the display case down to the locksmith shop.

Some ginger work with a screwdriver and some pliers, and one of the locks was liberated from the case. A little more work and it was back in its original shape.

I took the lock into the locksmith’s shop this morning. Ten minutes and $17 later, I had two keys that worked better than the originals. (Of course, I could have bought new locks for cheaper than it cost me to get a new keys made, but that would mean I’d have to pry the display case apart… nah.)

Watching the locksmith guy work was amazing. I mean, the guy was a machine - a little picking and some prodding on the lock, next thing you know there’s a key that fits it. I respect anyone who knows what they’re doing - if you can do a job and make it seem like you’re performing magic, that’s when you’re a real professional. It’s like when you see these shows on TLC where you have this team of like three guys and they build a new house in an hour and a half or something. It’s crazy and wonderful and downright amazing. That was this locksmith guy. It was cool and it made me want to learn how to be a locksmith. But then, there’s another part of me that really doesn’t want to know how he did it so I can retain that sense of mystery. Once you learn the magician’s secret, it’s not magic anymore.

Sometimes I wonder if that’s what people think when they see the programs I write up. Do they think, “Wow, like magic, that totally solved the problem in an elegant fashion!” or is it more, “Good - problem solved… moving on now…”? I’d like to think that I maintain that same level of magical professionalism that I saw at the locksmith’s shop today, but most of the time I think the stuff I do is taken for granted because of its intangible nature. Not much I can do about that.

Speaking of TLC, it looks like Trading Spaces is going to be on this new Discovery HD Theater thing that’s coming out. I’m hoping that we’ll get that with our digital cable; I’ve got an HDTV and I’d love to see how it performs.