Locker Wars

Over the years, a few of us staff at Apple Tree Orphanage engaged in a series of battles collectively christened the Locker Wars. The epic struggle for locker supremacy begot a cycle of supreme victories and anguishing defeats.

Here's how it worked: Our unit had eight small, metal lockers stacked in a casing in the staff office, each locker about twelve inches high, by six inches wide, by eight inches deep. The lucky eight of us who had a locker acquired it at some point through seniority, nepotism, or timing.

Anyway, a few of us locker overlords, who each worked a different shift, engaged for some time in guerilla locker warfare against one another in which we'd give the other guy hell by doing something cruel and unusual to his locker, or to him via his locker. Hence, the next time we worked our shift, we each expected our locker to have received a guerilla attack "in the night." Back and forth we struck, retributing one dirty prank with another.

Here are some of the battles we waged:

• I believe the very first Locker War skirmish occured when my shift partner, Justin, and I surprise attacked the locker of our coworker Martin, who worked a different shift from us, by stuffing it full of Cheerios via a small square hole along the bottom rim of the locker door. This attack was Justin's idea, and it was a stroke of genius. We heard later that Martin opened his locker, and hundreds of tawny Cheerios poured out in a rockfall onto the floor, which Martin had to subsequently vacuum up. Ha ha.
  
  Get this: I then followed up this offensive with another by taking a digital picture of Martin's photo on a wall in a hallway of the Orphanage -- a wall where our horrendous badge photos hung, I guess to illustrate some kind of organizational unity or to project some other kind of image (maybe humilation of the photo subjects?) -- and Photoshopped Martin's image into a Wild West "Wanted" poster with more or less the following text:
  
  "WANTED DEAD or ALIVE: The Cheerios Bandit.
  
  "Wanted for stealing Cheerios from innocent children.
  
  "Reward: 500 bonus tokens.
  
  "Caution: He may be armed and dangerous with a jug of milk."
  
  I posted the "Wanted" flyers in a multitude of various places, including one on Martin's locker, one in an obscure wing in the Orphanage, and one in the staff janitorial closet. I had made Martin infamous.
  
  
• Martin counterstruck by taking a styrofoam cup full of glitter and blowing the tiny glitter squares into my locker, via the square hole in the rim of the door, through a straw. He blew enough glitter into my locker that, when I opened it the next time I worked, it looked like a snowstorm of colorful sparkles had settled on everything in my locker. It was a Winter Wonderland of tinsel confetti on my stuff.
  
  
• In response, I filled a styrofoam cup with glitter about a third full and placed it right above Martin's locker, which was on the top row of lockers, and taped one end of a black thread to the cup and the other end to the locker door. I attempted to make the thread as inconspicuous as possible. The punch line would be that Martin would open his locker door, thereby pulling the cup off the top of the lockers and spilling all of the glitter onto him and the floor. Unfortunately I guess I didn't hide the thread well enough, and Martin discovered the contraption as he began to open his locker. He dismantled it without incident, foiling my clever counterstrike. Damn.
  
  
• Okay, fast forward a couple of weeks: My coworker Brant, covering for Justin, and I come in one night and discover that Martin accidentally left his locker unlocked (O, how we never forget to lock them now!). Heh, heh. This was going to be good. Really good.
  
  Brant took Martin's badge from the locker, wrapped it up in masking tape, and wrote, "Hi, I'm Martin," on it. He then taped a tampon onto the badge and taped the end of the tampon string to the ceiling of the locker, hanging it as a humiliating greeting for Martin the next time he worked.
  
  I, co-conspirator, took the joke a little further. I then plastered the inside of Martin's locker with a whole bunch of stupid stickers of some sort. I next took a styrofoam cup half-full of glitter and set it on some stuff in his locker, and tied a string between the cup and the door. I took another string and tied it between the door and a cup of glitter perched atop his locker (the decoy).
  
  When Martin next worked, he found the cup (the decoy) atop his locker and removed it, thinking he had successfully averted a viscious locker attack. He then cocksuredly opened his locker and -- boom! -- was showered, by the cup inside, in a blast of tiny fluttering sparkles. After that humiliation and ego-injury, he was then greeted by his flattering, "Hi, I'm Martin," tampon badge.
  
  
• Another time, Martin ambushed our coworker Alvin, who never bothered to put a lock on his locker, with a brilliant prank. Alvin came to work one night, and when he opened his locker, it was stuffed full of boys underwear nicked from the boys clothing closet. Alvin immediately knew it was Martin's doing and, like the rest of us, had a good, hearty laugh over it.
  
  
• Yet another popular surprise attack has been to coat the backside of a coworker's lock with peanut butter, margarine, lotion, or some other foul-feeling substance. Occasionally we're vigilant enough to check our lockers for booby traps before we begin the process of opening it, but more often than not, we rush right in and mindlessly grab our lock and—Crap! I got suckered again!
  
  I'll tell you what, peanut butter becomes an utterly filthy, disgusting mess when smeared across the fingers and palm ...
  

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There were other battles in the "Locker Wars," but I shall continue the recounting of them at a later time.

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© 2008 David Lee Cummings