After a few days of running around Skyrim picking every lock I ran across, my brain started muttering that I should try doing it in real life. So I ordered some lock picks (after checking that their possession isn’t a felony in WA) and hit up YouTube for some tutorials. And, of course, visited the hardware store for a lock to start practicing on.
I started fooling around with it today. It turns out that picking the sort of lock you probably have on your front door is really not that much harder than it is to pretend to pick an imaginary lock in Skyrim. I’m not at the point where I can reliably pick a full lock yet; I’ve been practicing on a lock with several of its five pins removed, and can succeed on a 3-pin lock about one time in six. But that’s only about four hours after first starting to open up a lock to start playing with it.
I don’t have any plans to use this skill, once I’ve got it down. It’s the kind of thing that’s useful for a law-abiding person about maybe twice a decade. Still. One of these days I may be insanely grateful I decided to play with locks for a while.
Unless the selection of skills I’ve been picking up lately – dance, aikido, lockpocking – is actually destiny preparing me to be a glamorous spy queen. You never know.