This single red locker at the NAD, School of Digital Arts, Animation and Design – UQAC (VFX & VG) in Montreal, became a celebrity on Tumblr last week. Apparently, students have been moving the locker around the school all semester.
Florence, a 20-year-old NAD student who first shared the story of the red locker, said people got more and more intense about moving it around.
"You would find it beside the exit and then the next day it would be in the back of the room, and things like that," Florence told BuzzFeed News. "But as weeks went on, the locker would be placed in even stranger places, like in the middle of lockers rows."
"But," she said, "when they placed it in the position as seen in the second picture, on top of the rows, shit went downhill."
She said after that, the principal posted a message on the school's private Facebook group saying that the students needed to start acting their age. The principal warned that doing dumb stuff with the locker might hurt someone or block a fire exit or something.
The first few comments on the principal's Facebook post were positive. Then the memes started popping up.
Like, there are tons of memes about this locker. "I didn’t show all of them on Tumblr because there are easily over a hundred," Florence said.
"All the pictures were done in an interval of about three days, but you would see one come out every half an hour during school hours and the evening," she said.
Weirdest of all is that it's still unclear who even owns the locker. Florence said that most students remove their lock from their locker at the end of ever semester, but this locker has had the same lock on it for as long as anyone can remember.
Also, like, it's just a weird single locker. What's the deal with that?
"Maybe it’s someone who doesn’t bother to follow the rules or doesn’t really use the locker room that much," she said. "I don’t know."
Florence shared all the locker memes on Tumblr and it's blown up huge, gaining almost 50,000 notes in the last week.
Like, seriously, there are so many of these.
But wait! The story doesn't just end with photoshops.
The NAD School had a big end-of-semester party where students present a bunch of projects in a big theater packed with people — and guess who was on stage? THE LOCKER!
Florence said that a lot of the staff thought the whole thing was pretty funny and that the locker was up on stage during the whole party. The principal went up to make a presentation and finally acknowledged the red locker.
"[The principal] had to make a few speeches and since the locker was on stage the whole time, she took time to 'present' it to the audience," Florence said. "All of it with a smile, so I think she took it well in the end."
Oh, and, the locker got to wear a fancy boa for the celebration.
A spokesperson for the school gave BuzzFeed News some more context.
"It began a few weeks ago," the spokesperson said. "I think two students took a locker from the basement and put it in the place where it doesn't belong."
They said that after it went viral they decided to play into the joke. So the administration brought the locker onstage. "We brought it onstage and everybody wanted to take pictures with it," they said.
Where's the locker now? Apparently, it's just chilling at the entrance of the school. "It's like a totem for us now," the spokesperson said.
But here's the thing. BuzzFeed News asked about what is still the biggest mystery of all of this: Who is using this locker?
"We don't know who was using this locker," they said.
The school also gave BuzzFeed News two more photos of the locker.
Including this amazing group shot.
