Daily Dose of English 146
Terraces
Daily Dose of English 146
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you can make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about terraces. A terrace is like a little patio or an outside place on like an apartment building usually you can't leave the terrace and It is a bit more Like it's connected to a house, but it's a very small outdoor area. I guess you could say Let me quickly make sure I'm spelling it right terrace. I Terrace yeah sounds like yeah, it's like terraces. I spelled it correctly in the title And they are There's a lot of words that are kind of similar so terrace patio What else Deck could be a similar word, but it's one of those things you kind of have to see it to know. And I want to talk about my terrace today because I did something dumb and I locked myself onto my terrace today. So this morning, it was like 6.45 and I went to go outside on the terrace to clean out the cat litter boxes because they need some cleaning and some tidying. And it doesn't smell great, right? It's litter, it's cat litter. So I closed the door and I cleaned out the litter boxes. Then I turned to go back inside And it was all the way closed. I had completely closed the door, not just mostly. And for some reason on this terrace, there's no handle on the other side of the door. It's a one-sided door. You have to open it from the inside. There's also no locking mechanism. Sorry, there's no locking mechanism, but there's no option to lock or unlock it. So it's always locked. So I can't disable this feature unless I tape it or something, which I might do. This happened to me like the very first day that I moved to this apartment as well. And so I started leaving the side window open just a little tiny bit, like not even open, just not latched, I guess, because I was like, well, I'm going to need a way to get back in if nobody's around. But that didn't happen this time because that window at some point got closed and so I was out on the terrace With no tools with no keys. I just had my phone with me, which is nice so I was able to Eventually call for help and get somebody to come help me in but for a solid like 15-20 minutes. I was trying to Open stuff right trying to jiggle the door open or the window or something like that I even tried using a Beer can that was outside that I like tore apart into like trying to make a little tool but nothing worked and And so eventually I talked to the, um, the, the doorman for this building, uh, he, who is downstairs and I got him to find a, a locksmith to come because he couldn't open the door. He doesn't have keys. And I use the deadbolt on the door, not like the little handle lock, which means that you like a handle lock. You can open usually a deadbolt. Not really, unless you have tools, you're not really getting into a deadbolt unless you can pick a lock. Which a doorman can't So he had to call or were we I first I tried to call a locksmith that's open 24 hours, but they just didn't answer I and then if I we eventually found a different locksmith who came and that was probably like an hour ish after I got locked out and And then the locksmith came, but he could not open the lock. It was, it's a very good lock. He tried to drill it, where you like drill into the lock and open it that way, but he broke like two or three drill bits on it. He's like, yeah, your lock is really good. I can't really get into it. And the way the door is made means that he kind of can't open it unless it's like, you're gonna wanna destroy the door, which isn't really a good choice. So eventually, we got on a video call and I was like, because we were like, maybe it's easier to open the, where I am, the terrace, but obviously he can't get there because he can't climb walls like Spider-Man. So he goes up to the roof and he lowers down a bag with some tools in it to me, whatever, three stories that it is, and he lowers stuff down to me. And then I open the window rather forcefully with a screwdriver, or two screwdrivers actually is what it required. And that was after over two hours of being out on the terrace. And so then I finally opened the window and then he replaced the lock and all this stuff. And so thankfully it wasn't that expensive. Um, like it was a couple hundred bucks that I wasn't planning on spending, but. it wasn't like, like I would expect like in the U S for it to be way more expensive. Um, so I'm, I'm very grateful that it was very reasonable, um, to, to do it. And there's not a ton of damage that I have to worry about. So that's not a huge problem, but it was very difficult to lose over two hours of my morning just being stuck out on my terrace because it was, really not fun and quite annoying. And I had a cat out there with me. He was outside checking out what was happening when I got locked in and he started to sort of freak out a little bit. And so I had to like try to calm him down because he was like, I want to go inside. I want to go inside. I'm going to go get a letter. And I was like, no, we can't. Sorry. Hang on. Um, And so I was definitely thrown off the entire day. And I think that's like the big thing to mention is that like losing time like that or having something just so big come into your day that you're just not expecting or thinking about is so disconcerting, I think is a good word. Disconcerting is when something is confusing in a way that like, kind of makes you forget where you are or what's happening or something like that. And so in this case, it was like, okay, I was doing my morning routine. I had just made coffee that was sitting on the counter. And so I could see my coffee inside and I didn't have anything to do besides just be on my phone for a while, which I don't like to do. And so I was like, not able to focus very well, I missed a lesson with Czech, and all this is fine. It's not really a huge issue, but it's confusing, if that makes sense. Imagine if you woke up one day in like a different house and everybody was like they are like people, you know, but like They're acting like it's normal and you're like, where am I? What's going on? How did I get here? I don't understand what's going on and that's sort of how I felt very Confused discombobulated is another word discombobulated. It's basically confused but like in a more Sudden way, I guess like somebody who's got confused sort of suddenly and like they got turned around or whatever you might say is discombobulated. And so it's a very weird day. I didn't actually want to record this episode, but I really try to record every single day. But yeah, it was not a super fun experience. Don't recommend it. However, something I wanna talk about is like how you fix something like this, right? So anti-fragility, or no, anti-fragile. Yeah, anti-fragility is the word. Something that's anti-fragile breaks still, like so in this case, my process or something goes wrong. However, instead of being irreparable, unreparable, One of those instead of being something that can't be fixed. I'm going to come up with a way so that it never happens again Right. So one thing that I did is I got more extra keys, right? So I only had two keys before to my apartment now I have more and I'm going to leave one actually out on the terrace so that if anybody gets locked out there They at least have a key to give to somebody to come up and open right so they can just drop it to the whoever I'm also going to fix the window so that you can't lock it, because I think that it's ridiculous that a terrace like that has this ability. It just seems like poor design. And so I can just remove the lock from the terrace. It's very, very difficult to get up onto this. to get up onto this, oh sorry, remove the lock from the window. It's very difficult to get on the terrace so I'm not really worried about anybody getting inside. So that's not really a worry for me. And so having that unlocked is just a good idea. I'm also going to make sure that at least somebody has a key to help if need be. Like what happens if I'm not able to do something right if i somehow get very injured um somebody needs to be able to access my apartments as i live alone and so yeah that's how i'm going to fix the problem and yeah i hope that maybe you uh take that philosophy a bit and next time something bad like that happens to you, because I'm sure it will and it will to me as well in the future, you can't avoid bad things happening, that you make an improvement to your life so that it doesn't happen again in the same way and that you can constantly be less stressed and more happy with your situation. But that's all that I have time for today. That's our time. I hope that you enjoyed this episode and listening to about my dumb ass self. And let me know down in the comments, what's something stupid that you've done recently? But I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode. Have a good one. Bye.
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