Dripping wet, a towel draped across my shoulders, I stand shivering before a gym locker. I spin the knob on the combination: 34-8-24, I mouth silently, as I have done so many times before.

It doesn't open.

Frustrated, I jiggle the lock and try again. And again. And again.

For more than three years, I have been swimming at a gym near my work. The thrice-weekly exercise offers a wonderful break from my desk job and helps keep me out of the nearby restaurants during lunch hour. And for all three of those years, I have been spinning the same combination lock. But this time it isn't working.

In 30 minutes, I am scheduled to meet with my boss, and the only accessible covering I have are my towel and the wet swimming suit bunched on the floor before me. This swim is turning into the kind of fiasco you see in a TV sitcom.

Quickly, I don my wet suit and head to the lifeguards' station. Maybe someone can help. A young sympathetic woman calls a custodian, and I rush back to the locker room to try again: 34-8-21.

Magically, it opens, just as a male custodian pokes his head tentatively into the women's locker room, listening for an all clear before entering.

"The stupid thing works now," I explain to him, waving my hand derisively at the lock in an attempt to cover my blunder.

"Twenty-one, not 24," I repeat silently, giving myself a swift mental kick.

Later that evening, as I share my "brain freeze" with my husband, Steve, he laughs out loud. "That's what happens when you get older," he reminds me. "It's just the way it is."

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Steve is sitting in his favorite easy chair, his shoulders slumped, a defeated look on his face. It is Father's Day, and he's just spent the better part of the morning installing — or trying to install — a tachometer in his 1967 Mini Cooper.

Steve plans to drive the car-on its tiny 10-inch tires to the annual Mini-Meet East, held later this summer in Frederick, Md.

The tachometer will help keep him from over-revving the car's 850cc engine as he climbs the long, steep grades of the Appalachian Mountains.

Skilled in car maintenance, Steve has installed tachs in several cars before, but it's been awhile.

"I read the directions twice and even took notes," he explained. "And I still screwed up."

According to Steve, the installation is simple, but you have to be careful when running the wires from the tachometer through the car's firewall to the engine. If you cross them, you can burn up the meter.

Despite his extra caution — reading and re-reading the directions and color-coding the wires beforehand — he hooked it up wrong. And sitting in his easy chair that Sunday morning, he wasn't certain whether he'd ruined the meter.

"Brain freeze," I remind him gently, an oft-repeated refrain in the Schmitmeyer house.

Linda K. Schmitmeyer is a freelance writer living in Middlesex Township. Her e-mail address is lks260@zoominternet.net.