Okay,own up.

It happened in Waterford in 2004. Family we were visiting lived in a long narrow bungalow with the kitchen / front room at one end of the house, a bathroom in the middle and the parents ensuite bathroom down the other end.

I went to the regular bathroom (bungalow middle), found it engaged, so went to use the parents’ ensuite.

Went in, closed the door behind me, did me business, and turned the doorknob to leave.

The doorknob wasn’t a handle, it was one of those bulb shaped things that you twist. This knob twisted round and round again with zero resistance, meaning that the part inside the door that holds it closed wasn’t being pulled back to let the door open.

So I was locked in a bathroom I hadn’t told anyone I was going to, and well out of earshot from the rest of the house.

After thinking hard, I figured I could call the house telephone - nobody else had a mobile at the time - and ask someone to come down and help me. Not having their number, I struck upon the idea of calling whatever the equivalent of 11811 was at the time.

According to the lady operator, there were something like 9 Ann McCaffertys in Waterford, and I hadn’t a breeze what district or whatever it is to narrow it down. So I set about calling them.

The only one I remember was a elderly lady, hard of hearing, who didn’t understand that I was looking for a different Ann McCafferty, but dutifully went off to check her bathroom to see if it was hers I was trapped in. Being too polite to just hang up, I had to wait 15 painful minutes listening to silence on the phone, knowing I was responsible for sending an old lady to check her bathroom to see if a man was trapped in it.

After about 40 more minutes of this nonsense, my aunt enters the bedroom containing the ensuite I’m stuck in. Turns out all I had to do was push the door open, the builders never bothered actually negotiating the whole doorknob-doorframe relationship. There was zero resistance. But hey, I got a story out of it.