The 32-Year Old who Walked Into The Shower and (Nearly) Disappeared

Last week my husband and I went to Sussex and pitched our tent at the Housedean Farm Campsite.
It was a wish of me to spend a little more time in and around Brighton again - since we got married there pretty much exactly six years ago it had been daytrips only.

After a nice and relaxed afternoon stroll through Hove and some fish&chips on the beach on the first day we survived an unsettled night as the storm was blowing unhindered over the field and was working on tearing the tent down.
The next morning was rainy and grey - time for a shower to get the day started.
A special feature of this campsite is their open air shower. You obviously don´t get seen from the outside but there is no roof so you have the proper outdoor experience, especially when it rains.

I flipfloped to the facility area, shut the door with a hook from the inside and did what one does in a shower.
Short-haired as I am and practical as I can be (emphasising the can here) taking a shower usually takes me no longer than five minutes in total. Just as it started to rain again I was ready and dressed, grabbed my stuff, unhooked the door and...the door didn´t open. I pushed it, I slightly shook it, nothing.
Fuck.

Through a gap in the wooden door I could see fellow campers walking past but I felt too awkward and embarrassed to shout for help.
So I stood there, waiting for my husband to search for me, waiting for a good idea how to get out of here again.
Getting rained on, listening to the French teenagers on the other side of the door, wondering what "I can´t open bloody door" is called in French, knowing I would never say it anyway.
Cold...angry...miserable. Cursing the shower, the site, the trip, the entire world.

I felt like Michel´s Dad in "Michel aus Lönneberga" written by Astrid Lindgren (called Emil i Lönneberga in English and the Swedish original) when he gets locked in the toilet and stuck in the window after attempting to escape. He eventually plots to blow the whole toilet up...so did I!

There would be a chance to climb over the side but then I would be sitting on the roof of the toilet block, not somewhere I could just appear gracefully and make it look like the most normal thing to do in the world...
Where the fuck was my husband?!? It was at least 30 minutes ago now that I had left the tent. I could see him waiting, unsure what to do...I was so angry, I could be dying here without anybody noticing!

Eventually he came to my rescue and let cold and wet me out again.
It took me a while, some tea and tears to recover.

Later that day we had a look together at the evil shower door again.
It turned out that the door had an ordinary shed door mechanism that shuts itself when pulled and in order to open it again the doorknob needs to be slightly turned.
It turned out that aprox. 99,9% of the population would have had no problem opening that door.

I´m just a hopeless case sometimes, not practical at all!
But gained a story for the grandchildren now.