The Case of the Locked Beetle -- a HOWdunit

My Bug was yellow, but not as clean-looking as this one.

I had a long history of locking keys inside of cars. Many times in many different cars. I finally decided that the best practice for me was to simply not lock my car anymore. I felt especially comfortable doing this with my beat-up, but treasured, Volkswagen Beetle. It was old and had been broken into so many times that anything worth taking was already gone, so I just left it open and was completely at peace about it. Anybody who tried to take advantage of it would find that they had wasted their time.

But at a place in Culver City where I was interning, my preceptor requested that EVERYONE please please lock their cars. For Nancy's sake, I started locking it when I was at her business.

Sure enough, within days of her request I had managed to lock my keys in my car. When I realized my predicament, I sought help from a couple of friendly people who were nearby. We tried to fiddle with door, slide something down inside, get the wind wing open, etc. No luck.

One of the guys who was helping me decided to look inside my trunk to see if there might be a crevice somewhere where we could snake something in and get to the lock or to the wind wing. The trunk didn't lock any more, of course, so he opened it right up.

Once the trunk was open, I had to laugh as we all saw the easy and obvious solution to my problem. Within seconds I was holding my keys again. Can you guess what the solution was?