Warning: tl;dr:
Being the prepared (ie OCD) person I am, I travel with a special dog-walking fanny pack. Tiny front zip pocket holds keys. Next zipped section for “recall treats” (ie bribes), back section for my phone. Doggie bag dispenser clipped to the side.
For fear of this exact lockout situation, I make it a point to never ever leave or even open the door without my phone & the keys in hand, or in the walkie bag attached to my waist.
Fast forward to a dog sit in a high-rise in a major metro area. The apartment keys include a fob that gets you into the building, but since the fob is rather large, it doesn’t fit in the usual zip pocket, so I drop it into the bribe pocket with the treats instead. A few days down the road, I strap on the walkie bag & head out with my doggo, tossing a bag of trash in the giant bins in the fob-accessible rubbish room on the way outside.
Because this doggo can be a bit reactive sometimes, she tends to earn a lot of distraction treats (bribes) on walks — so I’m dipping into that now-partially-unzipped pocket fairly often. Forty minutes later we get back to the high rise, I reach into the zippered pocket for the fob and…oh no. No, No No. NO…NO…Nooooo!!!. Keys are NOT THERE. I empty the pouch. Repack the pouch. Re-empty pouch one treat at a time. Trace back to local trash can where I disposed of the 
-filled doggy bags…no fob/keys.
It is hot. The dog is tired & thirsty & wants to go inside. I am silently freaking out. Did I accidentally throw the keys into the trash bin in the trash room I no longer have access to? No — they had to have slid out of the pouch when I leaned over to pick up the doggo’s business. (The dog ‘d 3 times on our walk, but I’m pretty sure I remember each spot for that morning. Or at least 2 of them? Omg I am SO fudged….)
EXCEPT…suddenly I remember that in fact, I am actually brilliant. Why, you ask? Because I always AIRTAG the dog’s collar AND the HO’s keys & carry my phone with me…so as long as I really didn’t throw the keys into the trash bins inside by accident, we should be golden.
I’ll skip the finer details about how Apple’s gps tracking is less than stellar when surrounded by tall metal buildings, and how the keys kept supposedly “teleporting” from place to place whenever I was within 5 feet of them. As it turns out, the helpful stranger who kindly placed them in the crotch of a nearby tree didn’t really do me a favor, but how were they to know I had gps, and that it was too dumb to tell me to look UP instead of down on the ground? But eventually I did, and there they were — thank you, Apple!
