The fact is, the king was a good deal more than a king, he was a man; and when a man is a man, you can’t knock it out of him.

– Mark Twain, A  Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

The Tale of the Odorous Locker

One of the many roles I play at the school where I work is “Keeper of the Locker Keys.” However often you think that role comes up, triple it, then cube it. It’s kinda ridiculous.

The thing is, most of our kids don’t actually want to lock and unlock their lockers. Most of them unlocked their lockers with their combinations on the first day of school, jammed the lock with a pencil or something, and haven’t bothered with the combination since. Pretty much any time someone unjams a locker (“as a joke,” usually), my Keeper of the Locker Keys job comes into play, because hardly any of the students actually know their combinations. That said, there are a few who use their locks religiously.

Last week, the Senior Prank (which was rather genius by the way) included, but was most certainly not limited to, unjamming all the lockers and putting padlocks on about half of them. You can imagine what the locker-key demand was after that! But it just so happened that about the same time, we got gnats. You know, like the kind from the plague. They are super-annoying, and our sweet 6th grade teacher, who has enough class pets to run her own zoo, assumed they were her fault. NOT SO.

Right after school today, I heard this in the hall: “Professor, I think there’s an animal behind these lockers.” “What?” “Well, it smells horrible. It’s smelled bad for a while, and it keeps getting worse. I think something is dead.”

Sounds like a recipe for fun, don’t you think?

A group of students, plus a couple of profs and the headmaster, figured out which locker might be the source of the offending smell, so I lent them my keys.

Fortunately, it seems that the only thing that is dead is someone’s old lunch. She apparently hasn’t been using her locker. SINCE NOVEMBER.

That might be a slight exaggeration, but that stuff was pretty much liquified in slushy rottedness. You should have seen these seventeen year-old kids running up and down the halls, chasing each other with rotten stinky food, screaming like little girls, and trying to figure out how to decontaminate the locker and rid the school of the insects.

It’s May. What can I say? I’m easily amused at this point.