Except it makes no sense if you look at the thing, because then you realize that the "lock" and "key" are literally the same thing. In the real world, the lock

Except it makes no sense if you look at the thing, because then you realize that the "lock" and "key" are literally the same thing. In the real world, the lock and the key are completely different objects - there's no way to confuse which is which (and there's no way for one to act as the other if you use them in opposite order, either). The analogy doesn't make sense because it's skipping the existence of the third thing that's the actual (pad)lock - the encryption/decryption software. And it does that because it wants to talk about data as having the property of being "locked", which makes no sense in the first place, but that one isn't immediately obvious. The whole analogy of locks and keys fundamentally makes no sense when talking about data, because locks are external devices, attached to or directly containing the protected thing, while encryption is the process of scrambling the very thing being protected. All confusion stems from this bad choice of analogy, trying to "make it simple" for the normies.