Lockers!?

Once upon a time, there was a little girl who would watch a lot of English movies and sitcoms, read several high-school novels etc. And invariably she would end up thinking how cool it was that the American kids didn't have to carry huge loads of books to school. They just had lockers! Cool lockers with a lot of pictures on the inside. Battered lockers against which the school's jocks would lean and flirt with the eyelash-batting swooning female fans. Rigged-nerd-lockers that were waiting to spill out the awesomely gruesome stuff that the school bully had stashed in there as a prank. And invariably those damsel-in-distress lockers that would stay jammed until someone who you have a crush on (or vice versa) comes and opens it for you.. Ah, lockers.

But all that was once upon a time. Right here, right now, in la-la-land.. I stand looking at my locker in desperation. Face it, I've never owned a locker before! But the idea was so cool that I got myself one at work. To stash a spare set of clothes just in case I ripped/snagged my pant, or God forbid sprayed myself with a batch of epoxy like one of those B-grade-sci-fi-horrors at midnight. And then, 'Fly-style' or last-week's-episode-of-Heroes-Mohinder-style, I'd just mutate and wreak havoc on society, wuhahaha. (That’s my version of the evil-laugh, by the way).

Anyhow.. I got my locker - one of those styles where the combination lock is a part of the door itself. And you just enter the combination, shimmy the latch a bit, and voila, open sesame. But sadly, what happened was far from it. I tried, and tried.. add a dozen 'and tried's to the statement.. and I gave up. After a week or so, I caught hold of one of the women who share the locker room and asked her to show me how. She did it so easily. I watched and thanked her profusely for educating this locker-ingenue. And then once she left, I decided to try it again. And what do you know!! No luck.

Three months have passed since then. Today, with renewed vigor, I stood there trying to open up my combination lock. No success. I got back and researched it online.. Google, eHow, wikiHow. OMG, how tough is it to open a damned locker? And I still struggle in vain.

Its me against the bleedy locker. Me, in all my scrunched-up-face, hope-nobody-is-watching, I-have-a-Masters-in-ChemE-damn-you-evil-locker, fervently-Googling-"Tips to Open Lockers", getting-ready-to-kick-the-locker-door glory..

The score is 0-22.

Serves me right!