Throughout my school career, I could never get my locker to open, at any of those schools. Oh, I always knew the combination to my combination lock, but just could never get the lock to work. In my second high school (yes, I went to two — and didn’t like either), my friend Tyndall would just unlock the damn thing for me and save me the aggravation of the struggle and him the irritation of having to hear about it. Finally, in my adulthood, I wised up and started buying locks that work off letters and that don’t need some dial to be turned; you just rotate the letters into position to spell out your secret word.

Proving yet again that I’m more of a word guy.

I share my background intentionally before relating this anecdote.

Not too long ago at the gym I belong to, there was a young guy in the locker room struggling with his lock. Trying the combination on the lock again and again, then spinning the dial to start over, and still not getting it. I could see he was about an inch away from heading to the front desk to ask them to get the bolt cutters.

Then he yelled out, “I got it! I got it!”

Then he added — and you’ll see I noted this — “I got it! 41-12-36! It opened!”

The good news: Well, next time he has this problem everybody who was there will be able to help.

The bad news: Well, we’ll see if they help themselves sometime he’s not there.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 28th, 2024 at 4:51 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.