At Bucerius, like at BU, we have lockers. Mine is in the basement, which isn't too bad because we enter through the basement. At BU they're in the basement too, but it's hard to say anything complimentary about that situation since the lockerroom is in a pretty irredeemably dreary location.
The lockers at Bucerius however are pretty nice: new, lockable with keys, and with mail slots at the bottom. I use mine a lot (for a change!) and have gotten used to finding it there on the bottom row in the middle of the clump of lockers to the right of the stairs.
Only today it wasn't there!
I went to where my locker usually is, where it's been every day since the semester started, but somebody else's locker was right where mine should have been.
For a moment I contemplated my sanity. Am I wrong? Is my locker really not here? Has my locker perhaps never been here? And in any case, if it's not here, then where is it? I do have a locker, right?
I scanned the labels on the lockers. None bore my name. I tried my key nonetheless, yet the door didn't open.
How does one lose a locker?
Well, you lose it when the school, somewhere between 11pm at night and 11am the next morning, decides to move them.
Fortunately, the panic confusion soon faded, and I noted that the labels on the lockers still ran in alphabetical order. Tracing them back I was then able to find my locker there at the end of the clump. The key opened it, and inside everything inside was just as I'd left it. Just not quite WHERE I'd left it...
But such things may be part of the intellectual rigor provided by Bucerius. Smart students should be able to solve these kinds of problems, I guess. This must be how the school keeps the student body on its toes...
Yet with good results, apparently. The school is all abuzz these days because the results of the first class of students to graduate from Bucerius and take the state exam are in, and the students seem to have done quite well. This is a big deal for Bucerius, because it's a huge, unprecedented, and risky experiment to have a private law school in Germany. It's the first of its kind, and a lot was riding on those results, to see if the school could provide the same quality of education (or even better) than the state schools. So far so good, it seems. The administration seems quite proud of what they've accomplished.
And apparently celebrated by rearranging the furniture.