The other morning, I parked on Throckmorton Street in downtown Ft. Worth to cover a news story. In a rush, I grabbed all my things and headed into the building. When I came back out, I noticed my keys sitting on the passenger seat of the car.

“I sure hope I forgot to lock the doors,” I thought to myself. I hadn’t. Of course I hadn’t.

“Damn your brilliant attention to detail!” I chastised myself. “Except for remembering the keys!

“Hey, it’s the station’s car and the station’s recording equipment,” I continued, still to myself. “You should throw the recording equipment through the window. After all, you did list ‘problem solving’ as a skill on your resume.”

But it looked like rain and I didn’t want to drive around all day with a broken window. The last thing I wanted to deal with was the threat of a damp sleeve.

Across the street, a construction crew was working on a building. I sidled up to them.

“Hey, question for you,” I opened. “I locked my keys in the car. Do you have any kind of wire or something I could shove in the door?”

“I bet there’s some in that dumpster,” one of them said.

I started toward the dumpster about 20 feet away. One of the construction guys ran ahead of me, climbed on top of the thing and started sifting around.

A moment later, he lifted a length of wire about four feet long out of the dumpster, wielding it triumphantly above his head like King Arthur holding Excalibur! Or perhaps also like “Macho Man” Randy Savage triumphantly wielding the WWF Championship belt at the end of Wrestlemania VIII. Whichever you prefer.

Back across the street, I started poking around the window of the car.

“Nope, that’s not going to work,” a woman called out to me as she walked down the street. “I’ve done this before. The way they make them now, you can’t fit the coat hanger through the door.”

She walked over and joined me in poking at the car.

“Sometimes if you peel back some of this weather stripping, you can get just enough room to get it around the corner. I’ll pull this back and you try to find an opening.”

After a few attempts, we’d made no progress. A meter maid rode up on a bicycle.

“Locked your keys in the car?” she asked.

“Why isn’t anyone accusing me of trying to break into the car!?” I responded.

“You look like the guy who’d be driving this car,” the woman with experience in this sort of thing explained.

“What happens here?” I asked the meter maid. “Do I still get a ticket if I’m still here when the meter runs out?”

“No, I’ll be back around later. Just try to stay with it until you get it figured out.” The meter maid pedaled off.

Shifting focus back to the wire, the other woman and I tried to devise a strategy. The broken window started sounding more attractive. At the church behind us, a crew pulled up to work on the HVAC system as a man in a suit walked by.

“Can you get any leverage? If you had a knife or something, you could probably pull the door out enough to fit the wire in,” the suit fella said.

While he was unloading equipment, one of the HVAC guys strolled over.

“How about this?”

He wedged a screwdriver into the door. The crowd was impressed (When I say “crowd,” remember that I mean the four of us. It’ll come up again. So will Wrestlemania VIII, actually.).

I worked the wire into the door, but couldn’t reach the handle.

“Undo the loop and use the end of the wire to try to poke the unlock button on the key,” screwdriver guy suggested.

Anticipation grew as I tried to apply enough pressure to the button.

On the first attempt, the wire slipped off.

I lost control on the second attempt, nearly sending the key chain careening into that gap between the passenger seat and the console. Murmurs spread through the crowd.

On the third attempt, my hand was steady, like when you’re trying to carry several glasses of beer at the same time. Finally, with a great thrust was the button depressed!

The news car beeped its message of unlocked glory as a thunderous cheer went up from the gathered crowd, much like when the Ultimate Warrior ran toward the ring to aid Hulk Hogan, also during Wrestlemania VIII!

I thanked the group of people who’d volunteered their services when they saw someone trying to break into a car: the dumpster diving construction worker, the woman who apparently does this sort of thing all the time, the idea guy who then delegated the job of applying leverage to a guy in a work shirt because, you know, that’s what people in suits do.

A minute later, I was driving away armed with both a greater sense of the importance of keys and a greater sense of community. This is what happens when we all unite behind a common cause. This is our car now, Ft. Worth. Feel free to continue running up to it and yelling things about politics while I’m stopped at red lights.