Back in the day...

...when I was 'gainfully' employed for 40+ hours a week, I worked in a hyper-masculine, cowboy-mentality environment. Believe me when I tell you that that's not a hasty description. Most of my comrades and I, reveled in the hired-gun nature of stack-testing, and thoroughly enjoyed most aspects of riding (or more accurately flying or driving) into a town (many of which we had been to before), fulfilling a need, and then riding out again. Very High Plains Drifter.

As it turns out, and in hindsight not surprisingly, most of us (the foot soldiers, not the supervisors/managers) were under the age of 25 -- the average age of the Vietnam foot soldier was nineteen, ni ni ni ni nineteen. As a consequence, we developed what might be described by some as a stereotypical immature male subculture for ourselves: aggrandizement of physical prowess and strength, a decidedly misogynistic view of the world, praising (what seemed to us) masculine characteristics in our one female colleague and eschewing anything that didn't fit our preconceptions, rating our coworkers by how much they could drink and how many meaningless sexual encounters they could have. In short, a period of my life that I can't wait to tell my grandkids about ...

Ok. So that was a very long intro to something that is likely to feel quite anticlimactic. One of the things that people were judged on, much like being able to whistle by placing two fingers of each hand in your mouth, was the ability to open a beer bottle with anything available. Because of our jobs, one of the more common implements was the hotel room remote, but the true artisan, much like that guy you knew in high school that could snap his fingers and send a penny (or any other similarly shaped object) whizzing past your ear, could use just about any commonly available item to ply his trade. But, try though I might, I was never quite able to figure out the secret to the remote-as-church-key brand of alchemy.

How much more chagrined would I have been if my boy Brian from Tewksbury (pronounced Tooks-berry) had been able to open a bottle with folded paper? I don't even wanna think about it.