When you return to your office after an evening workout and a Quiznos dinner, the last thing you expect to find is your office door swinging open in the breeze.

It was a Tuesday when it happened, at 7:45pm. No one was inside. No one was nearby. Only some random passersby, totally ignorant that the door to my work has been open to the world, leaving the contents unattended for the last two or three hours. Thousands of dollars of computer equipment, pricey furniture, and cash on hand. Not to mention all of my personal stuff.

I had left the office at 4:45pm this afternoon, eager to fit in a workout and a meal before an overdue phone conversation with my friend Mitchell.  My two coworkers were still in the office at the time. They must have gotten distracted and forgotten to lock the door on the way out.

Such a thing is an enduring nightmare for an OCD person. Rarely am I able to leave the office without double-checking to make sure I locked it. I’m even worse with my car–I can’t seem to walk away from it without returning at least twice to make sure I didn’t forget to secure the old sack of metal. It is a well-known routine for the sufferer of obsessive-compulsive disorder, which makes it all the more horrifying when we witness someone else neglecting the very thing we spend so much time agonizing over. While I’m thankful not everyone has the overwhelming urge not to check their locks eleven times over each time they leave a place, it is hard for me to understand how on Earth a person could leave a door, particularly one which acts as the barrier between the outside world and the place of their livelihood, swinging open for all to see. If the office was left open overnight, surely someone would’ve stumbled upon the place. Between the steady local foot traffic, regular meanderings of street people from nearby, and nightly stumbling-through of drunks from the neighboring strip of bars, surely this unattended office would’ve made an easy killing for the arbitrary opportunist.

Come on, people, this is my home!

Of course, I can’t say this.

I can’t report this to my coworkers. What am I going to say, that I forgot my wallet and came back to the office at night to find the door whimsically ajar? It’ll be a challenge, but I’ll have to keep this a secret.

Fortunately, no one sauntered in for a look. Or who knows? Maybe they did and left, having found the place just too uncomfortable to bear another moment. Regardless, there is a touch of irony in the fact that after more than 200 days of taking great pains to avoid detection, I’d find my office a veritable “Open House” to the entire population of Los Angeles.

Yet no one is curious enough to notice.

And perhaps that’s the lesson behind this whole experiment: Everyone is simply too busy to see what’s really going on.