Trapped in the Museum!

Yes, it sounds more like the title of a Nancy Drew novel than real-life experience, but it really happened. Fortunately, Nancy doesn't have the corner on the market of creative thinking in a tight spot.

It all began innocently enough. My friend Anne invited me to join her and her friend Mohamed at the butterfly exhibit at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. Mohamed is new in town and was trying to occupy those empty Saturdays that happen when you move to a new city and don't know anyone yet. Anne and I had a 2-hour break between sessions of General Conference, and a visit to the butterfly exhibit was the natural result of this confluence of need and opportunity.

The exhibit was enchanting. Essentially, it's a 3-story greenhouse filled with tropical plants and thousands of beautiful butterflies of all sorts that flutter around you as you walk. We had finished walking through the exhibit and were just calming our nerves after looking at the sub-exhibit of "the world's largest insects and arachnids" when we saw a door with huge bold letters: "Exit. No readmittance beyond this point." It was high time for us to be leaving to get back to conference, so we took the exit.

We found ourselves in a large stairwell with a rather neglected appearance - mold on the walls, a few empty paint buckets, and broken exhibit equipment. A door led outdoors into an overgrown area surrounded by a tall chain link fence. We climbed the stairs to find a succession of locked doors and no exit into the main museum. The door we entered by had locked behind us, and some exploration revealed that the outdoor area had no exits.

With no way out and no way back into the museum, we were trapped (cue scary music)! There were no surveillance cameras to clue the staff in to our plight, and the patrons in the butterfly greenhouse - who could see us if they looked - never noticed us. We had evidently found a loophole in the system.

We resorted to knocking on the door we had entered by, but the children in the play area on the other end seemed hesitant to open the door for us. Kudos to their parents for teaching them safe practices. Further and louder knocking eventually brought some adult, either a parent or museum worker, who informed us by shouting through the door that there was no readmittance through that door. Our attempts to convince them of our plight were unsuccessful.

We may have become the unsuspecting inhabitants of the museum's newest exhibit if one of us hadn't had a clever idea. The tickets in our pockets were printed with a phone number for the ticket office. It was no doubt printed there to assist museum patrons in purchasing their next tickets to the museum before the excitement of a visit could wear off. However, in a pinch it served equally well as an emergency hotline. A few minutes, a phone call and one unusual request of the ticket office staff resulted in our release and our breathing once more the sweet air of freedom. As we left, we noticed a small plaque next to the door with the huge letters, which indicated this exit was indeed an emergency exit only.

QED