Keja Orang Takde Keja

Ever since my bag got left behind in NL in 2006, the combination lock hadn't worked. My theory is, the Dutch authorities were worried I'd constructed a bomb out of their stinky cheese and strawberries, so they held back my luggage to check things out. In any case, by the time I got my luggage bag, most of the stuff had deteriorated, berries stained my clothes and everything reeked of spoiled cheese. Plus, as I said, the lock was broken. It didn't open at the combination I set, and there is at least a thousand combinations to choose from.
So one fine day, inspiration struck. Miss Big Boss had told us of the time her combination got screwed. Apparently it often happens if the bag falls on it combo lock, causing the locking mechanism to be 'turned' to an unknown combination. She solved it by methodically trying each and every combination until she struck the 'mystery' combo, somewhere towards the end of the long list.
I knew I could never succeed using this method due to my short attention span. I needed a different strategy. While being bored by a presentation in the morning, my brain wandered to other, more interesting things to do. Like discover a lost combination. And a plan was hatched.
The moment I was back in the office, I quickly did a simple spreadsheet which listed all the possible combinations, neatly lined up on a single piece of paper. That night, while watching TV, I randomly tried combinations and crossed them out from the list. Simple, right? After a while, i discovered that it was quite easy to do 20-30 numbers in sequence at a time. Soon, I was doing a hundred numbers at a go. Not wanting to go through all the numbers before striking it rich, I jumped around instead of following the sequence.
It was a bit frustrating when I didn't get anywhere after trying out 870 combinations. I finally found the unknown combo somewhere near the 900th mark. It came as a bit of a surprise, like doing the impossible, but hey, it worked! It took less time than I thought too. I was prepared to slog it out for half a day. Instead, it took less than two hours.
So now my luggage locks again. Flimsy defence against professional thieves, yes, but at least it can deter less trained petty filchers... Not a very important thing to do, but there's a certain kind of silly satisfaction from actually solving a mystery...