Locker Room Pet Peeves

For some young men, the locker rooms of yore were joyous places, where you could roughhouse, horseplay, and flaunt your accelerated maturation. The only danger was the occasional testicle-splitting wet towel snap.

In my high school football locker room, there was the famous game, "Soap Eyes", in which you had to jealously guard your place under the limited number of shower heads or a teammate would barge in yelling as if he had soap in his eyes and push you out. Then there was the game "Fake Prison Rape" in which some teammates would mock rape you...good times, good times. (I'll have you know I recorded a successful Soap Eyes block and also managed to elude my fake-prison rapers with a nimbleness that belied by status as a non-skill position player.)

But those days are gone, alas. Now all of us have gym memberships, and we change in fancy health club locker rooms with carpeting and enclosed showers and stalls with doors on them. Because men of all social standings and fitness levels use these facilities, you would think that a basic code of etiquette had been nailed down. Unfortunately, not. Most men do keep their exposure to a minimum, though you have to account for old farts, who grew up in a different time with different rules, and the strange impulses that propel some men to venture naked into jacuzzis or splay themselves out on the upper benches of saunas wearing nothing but their birthday suits.

But there is one issue that REALLY bugs me: PUTTING LOCKS ON LOCKERS

There are two primary roles of the lock. One, it preserves your valuables while you work out. And two: IT LETS ME KNOW WHERE THE FUCK YOU PUT YOUR STUFF!!

When I enter a locker room, the first thing I look for is an uninterrupted block of 5or more lockers. I then choose the middle locker and place my stuff in it, and I lock it up. Then I work out and come back, retrieve my stuff, lock it again, and take a shower. Then I return to my locker and get dressed.

About this time is when some dude also gets out of the shower. He proceeds to walk over RIGHT NEXT to my locker, and open up an unlocked locker to retrieve his stuff. DUDE! WHAT THE FUCK?? If I had known that your stuff was there, I would have not set up camp here!! Now we have to awkwardly share 4 feet of bench space, taking care to stagger our turning times so that we neither see nor bump into anything by accident. Meanwhile, THERE'S ACRES OF LOCKERS OUT THERE THAT YOU COULD HAVE CHOSEN!!!!

Some people might say, why don't you check the other lockers, to make sure no one has surreptitiously taken one...GREAT IDEA, BECAUSE OPENING UP LOCKERS AND SNIFFING AROUND AROUSES NO SUSPICION WHATSOEVER!! Besides, the whole point of this is--Men: You should know better!

The worst is when some guys actually choose the locker right next to you and don't lock up, AFTER I HAVE ALREADY CLAIMED MY LOCKER!!! Again, for some reason, personal space must not have existed before before 1980, because it's always the old guys who do this.

This gets me so mad, it makes me want to mock prison rape someone!