RE: Ein Schlüsselereignis: Meine Weihnachtsgeschichte 2023

surfing your posts (like, so much later), this was quite a story.
I hope you straightened stuff out for yourself to avoid any more incidences. For this reason, I have a keysafe mounted outside my apartment door. A few trusted friends also have the number to the safe, as do emergency services. If I am locked outside the building I likely would wait like you did for someone to walk the dog, but on 'regular' hours it would be easy to get in ringing some neighbors to open the door.
Fortunately for me, the trash room is inside the building, so I would not have had the same problem, besides, our trash room is not locked - I mean, who would want to steal the trash?