The third floor of Boulder High School is known for three things: the world language wing, getting freshmen lost, and the air conditioning that tries day in and day out to give us all hypothermia. But to me personally, the third floor is also known for an utter injustice that threatens us all… entire bays of lockers that seem to be half the size of those on the second floor.
Lockers have been exciting to me each and every year since I received my first one in sixth grade, but ever since freshman year when I realized the miniscule size of the third-floor lockers, I’ve been terrified to one day be assigned a locker there. I’m one of those people whose locker always seems to be overflowing with binders, coffee cups, and sports bags, a problem shared by many student-athletes… and that’s with a regular-size locker! On the third floor, it’s purely absurd to expect to fit a student’s entire academic life into a metal box that can barely hold two binders, let alone three bags, a pair of shoes, and a venti coffee.
Facing this terrifying dilemma, my friend Summer Gardner and I set out with a wooden ruler in hand to determine the exact danger these third-floor lockers pose to the BHS student body.
Based on our measurements and trusty Google calculator, we calculated the exact dimensions of each locker and found the third-floor mini-lockers to be 12 inches across, 36 inches tall, and 12 inches deep. The lockers throughout the rest of the school, however, measure 15 inches across, with the same height and depth. We even double-checked these measurements with the Republic Storage Lockers official website, which confirmed our calculations: the lockers on the third floor are three inches thinner than those throughout the rest of the building.
While that 3-inch difference may not seem like a huge deal, a 3-inch space with depth 12 inches and height 36 inches actually multiplies out to 1,296 cubic inches of space that the lockers are lacking. For an experienced locker-packer, the extra thousand cubic inches in the regular-size lockers could hold an additional binder, a hoodie or two, and provide ample space for an athletics bag. Students assigned a locker on the east side of the third floor hallway have been robbed of their storage space!
To be clear, not every locker on the third floor is the skimpy-size edition. There are a few bays of full-size lockers that match those seen throughout the rest of the school hallways. However, every single locker on the east side of the third floor, (or every locker claiming a number beginning with 1 instead of 3) is a measly small-size locker.
Why was this travesty done? Perhaps to accommodate the sheer number of students requiring lockers in years past, the school had to squeeze in extra lockers on the third floor by cutting down on locker width. However, this year, when most students are able to have their own individual locker instead of sharing, it seems that the availability of lockers is no longer a concern. This raises the question: do any students actually care about lockers anymore? Now that the baffling size of the third-floor lockers has been brought to light, perhaps we shall see.
