Back pain, exhaustion and finagling elevator passes are common symptoms of students forced to carry ginormous bags because they can’t open their lockers. Drawing by Nora Christy

Can you open your locker? I can’t either. I’ve tried entering the code, kicking the door, singing the code to the tune of Jingle Bells, picking the lock with Hello Kitty hairpins, entering President Trump’s birthday and forcing innocent passersby to enter the code for me. NOTHING WORKS.

If you can open your locker, I recommend you: 

a) Die in a hole because you are annoyingly successful.

b) Thoroughly explain how you do it without making me feel stupid. 

c) Spawn to help me open my locker whenever needed.

Fellow Cardinals, whether you can open your locker or not, we have a dilemma. Lockers lockers everywhere, and yet only a few will open. Why is this?

• We have all been given fake codes to test our perseverance on impossible tasks (math whiteboard problems are part of the same study).
• Everyone and their overly confident friend claims the combination locks should be turned a different number of times and directions.
• The click of doom when the code is right but the locker chooses not to open has been statistically proven to be one of the most demoralizing noises ever.
• Lincoln uses a formula that gives tall people short lockers and short people tall lockers, forcing us tall people to grovel on the nasty hallway floor to open our lockers.
• Only freshmen have convenient second-floor lockers, and the rest of us are stuck with lockers perfectly designed to be as far away from our classes as possible. 

Why is the administration doing this to us? Here are my hypotheses:

• Cross Country and Track & Field Coach Eric Dettman is trying to improve the endurance of the student body by making them do stair repeats with textbooks.
• The Department of Health rigged the locks to help us train for the newly reinstated Presidential Fitness Test.
• The architect who designed Lincoln horribly misunderstood the Cardinal Flock and designed the lockers to be opened by birds, not humans.
• After a successful Schools Survey, PPS decided our egos were too high and created mass locker confusion to crush them.