Hey!

Hey is a good word. It has lots of wonderful usages.

The ever-repetitive cheer in The Hey Song. (pretty dumb song anyway).

The universal "greet and nod" word used when you encounter people you sort of know.

Examples include, but are not limited to:

your roommate's friends that you don't know very well
a previous crush that you've definitely been over for a while
someone you know you know from class, work, your previous or current ward, or your mission
someone from your home stake who you've never seen since living in that stake
relatives that you should know better, but you don't
and all sorts of other random people you've met once upon a time.

The first word of Hey, Baby! Also the first word of Hey, Soul Sister. Both of which are very good songs.

It's a rill good attention getter. It's a catchy word.

A great word to say on road trips when you see hay bales in the fields to the side of the road. People fall for it all the time. (Think it through peeps).

An incredibly professional greeting for when you meet the president of your school. At least I thought so, when I so blatantly blurted it out upon meeting Pres. Samuelson last Saturday. Oh well.

Lockers

I have three lockers at school. My bass clarinet locker is a new locker from when the instrument lockers were redesigned this summer. The new lockers don't have a latch or anything; after you get to the last number, you just turn it a little more to the right and it clicks open. It should be easy, right?

Ha. It's not. It usually takes me about three times before I can open it.

Because of the redesign of the instrument lockers, smaller instruments are no longer provided with lockers in that area of the HFAC. So I have a locker for my clarinet in the photography wing of the HFAC (10 pts to any HFAC dweller who can tell me where that is!). It's a regular locker, but for some reason, it took me a least a dozen spins of the dial to get it to open correctly today. I felt rill ding-dang-dong stupid. And since it's on the bottom, I normally just squat to open it and quickly grab my instrument. But no, today, I had to literally kneel down on the ground, put my stuff in my arms on the ground, spin the dial with one hand and hit the locker with the other. Did it open? Good golly, not yet! It just needed a good kick. Ok, great. Now I have my instrument. Fast forward a couple of hours, and I have to open the locker again to put my instrument away. Yet again, another ding-dang-dong stupid feeling moment. Normally the traffic in that hall of lockers is very limited. But no, today the girl who has the locker two away from mine came to her locker at the same time. "Oh great, she'll think I don't know how to work the locker combination." I wasn't wanting another lesson on "Spin clockwise to the first number, spin counter-clockwise for the next number, passing it once, spin clockwise to the third number and lift latch." Yeah, the spinning part is great, it's the latch part that's the catch (play on words, get it?). Another kick, another slam, another sigh of frustration, and FINALLY, I could open my locker! And it was shortly after that other girl came, too, so she didn't see me looking like a fool talking to an inanimate object in frustration. Yay.

Oh, but then, I get to the stadium for marching band. I have another locker there for my marching clarinet and music. Normally I have no problems whatsoever with the lock or locker. But when I get to the stadium today, I realize that I hadn't properly closed it the last time, so it was still wide open.

Yeah. I remember in fourth grade when we first started using lockers at Parker Elementary, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Definitely not anymore.