Grounded down by the ground
As a student we all believe ourselves to be much better in math then we actually tend to be. I went to a school with well over 1000 students in the halls at any one time. We believed that we were unlike anyone else around us. And there was mathematical proof. All you had to do was to look at the rows of book lockers each with their own combination lock. We were sure that we had the only one with our combination. The odds are good in a population size like that where each lock is issued to a single person that I believe was based in fact. None of us understood how mathematical numbers really work or else we would not have still been in high school. Anyhow our locks were an important part of our identity in a very abstract manner. If you kept your combination secret then the odds of your math book being stolen remained minimal. We were so sure that our individual lock was unlike any other that we actually tried to keep them from year to year. That was the reality. In a school of my size there were a definite number of issued locks but we were unaware of how many more were kept in shipping cartons in the back of the main office. The only reason the I learned about this was that my lock was destroyed accidentally. Not in the way you imagine. It was not cut away by the janitor using giant tools. Rather when our family went on vacation towing a small tent trailer my lock was repurposed to keep the trailer with us. A long train. And that chain drag on the ground. After a week or so of travel my lock had a visible whole in the base. A cheap metal case grounded down by the ground. And when I returned to school a couple of months later and went to the office to find out how difficult it would be to receive a new lock I was told to put my dollar bill on the desktop and take a box of locks and find the one that I liked best. The school had no worries about running out of locks. I no longer have that lock nor do I have its replacement. Locks are just an incidental in school. Leave the lock there past the end of June and it will be removed for good.
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