Whether we
are keyed up for combos is determined early in life. Both my wife and I
are keyed the same and detest combination locks. To this day she
remembers having nightmares of forgetting the combination to her high
school locker. The first combination I remember forgetting was to the
lock on my Schwinn® bicycle. I grew up in what you’d call a high crime
area and if you didn’t have your bike chained down to something solid it
would be gone in five minutes. And sometimes even if you had it chained
to a heavy duty bike rack you might return after school to find the
rack and all the bikes gone.
I carried
a two foot length of heavy chain and a combo lock everywhere I rode my
bike. The lock had a three digit combination and I’ve always had a
terrible memory so I made the date of my birthday the combination to my
bike lock. This was a common practice but it was a terrible idea because
one time while I at my birthday party at the YMCA one of my “friends”
was stealing my bike. Gee, I wonder how he knew the combination, could
it be the date of my birthday he now knew? I heard he became a computer
hacker later in life.
I
had no trouble remembering the numbers to my combo locker in high
school, I just couldn’t remember what order they went in. Let’s see, was
it two turns to the left or one turn to the right? I got so desperate I
wrote down the combination with a Sharpie on my locker door, which kind
of defeated the whole purpose.
I gained lots of experience opening locks as a roustabout in the
oilfields where you couldn’t go half as mile without having to open a
gate. As a roustabout I rode shotgun on a A-frame truck with a mechanic
boss and my main job was hopping out of the cab to unlock all the gates.
It was great training to be a rancher later in life.
No comments:
Post a Comment