Locker room lores

We have a state-of-the-art gym and a Olympic sized pool offered to use as part of the amenities provided by my office building. I have used the gym a grand total of one time. The pool has fared slightly better in terms of the number of visits as my work friends and I are bitten by the swimming bug every summer. For the duration of the swimming fever, we try to visit the pool at least once a week during lunch time.

Swimming fever season is currently on and we visited the pool today. The swim session went off fine and we headed off to the locker rooms post session. I blithely dialed the code to the locker I had stowed my belongings in and turned the lock to "unlock". It refused to budge. Puzzled, I ensured that the number code was right and tried again to set it to the open positon. No dice. With a sinking sensation I realized that I had probably forgotten to set a code in the first place and now had no clue what the random number I had locked the locker with was!

As I stood there in my swim clothes, dripping water, I ran through my options: a. wait till someone else showed up and ask if they could go fetch some help. b. see if there was a phone to call for help c. go for help myself. Plans a and b were swiftly discarded as the locker room did not have a single other human soul in it and there were no phones. So, with my towel clutched and thanking God for wearing a swim suit which looked more like a wet suit (to prevent zebra-tanning), I dripped my way out. I saw a security guard immediately outside the locker room and told him of my predicament. He brightly informed me that he did not work for the gym, so he could not help me. !@#$%. Fortunately, there was another security guard who also worked for the same company but who was quicker on the uptake. He offered to go and get help from the gym front desk so that I would not have to drip my way there. Phew.

He came back with a master key. I took it and went back to the ladies locker room, opened my locker with it and took it back out. It all ended better than I had envisioned but I was still pretty annoyed with myself for being so scatter-brained.

once I got ready, I went back to meet my waiting colleague. I started telling him about my mishap and he promptly said "So you got the master key". I was surprised that he knew about the existence of such a key. But he finished listening to my story. I concluded it with "I am still a little upset at being so careless". My colleague consoled me saying, "That's okay, many people do that. So, don't worry too much. On the other hand, you know, once, I forgot which locker I had put my stuff in. And then I had to try to open every locker in the room. Now, that was embarrassing."

I think I laughed for a solid 2 minutes.

Seriously - nothing in life is so bad that it can't get worse.