Moment of the week: Bottle Capped.

Last week, one of the deputy directors of the school invited us to a dinner at his house, the night before his daughter’s wedding.

It was a really great meal, full of nyoom (one of my favorite Cambodian salads), rice and sour soup and some deliciously spicy chicken with lemongrass.

There is always some drinking that goes on at these events. Midway through the several course meal, I managed to observe the next table over. I noticed the discipline director looked as though he had had a few, but he looked happily content. I then saw that he was grabbing for another bottle of beer – but he realized that they did not have a bottle opener at their table. The next thing I noticed was that he was trying to open one bottle of beer by using the bottle cap of another bottle of unopened beer that was turned upside down.

Now, I did go to college and have seen many methods of attempt that people have tried in that very same situation, but this was a first for me. He went on giving it a try, and was being fairly persistent. Then a few minutes later, I saw the head of the Physics department walk up to the table, shaking his head at the discipline director in complete dismay. I mean, he is a physics teacher after all and the head of the department no less – and he ought to know how things of force and motion can or can’t make a thing work. He watched the discipline director struggle for a while trying to balance the two bottles and make it work and then finally grabbed the bottle from him and went for the time-trusted method of placing the bottle cap wedged and in line with the table top, and popping it off with one fast pound of the fist to the top of the cap. He smiled, and handed the beer over. And the evening went on.

It was a pretty timeless moment to say the least.