the bottle cap opener inspector

Every week he stops into the facility to inspect their bottle cap openers. There had been talk about these visits becoming monthly, or even quarterly, similar to what he’d seen happen to his peers that certify fire extinguishers and elevators, but so far clearer heads had prevailed.

It had only been a few years since the company had caught someone trying to bring in a bottle cap opener on their keychain. He shudders to think what would happen if this became commonplace. Can you imagine if every employee was allowed to bring in their own fire extinguisher or elevator?

Freedom is the cute sister-in-law of chaos.

Certain people even question the need to have a bottle cap opener inspector in the first place. They ask why bottles with screw off caps were banned to begin with.

You can’t reason with these types of people.

“If I have to explain it” he would begin, “then you probably wouldn’t understand anyway” and leave it at that.

He doesn’t just inspect bottle cap openers. He analyzes them. He scrutinizes them. It’s as if he lives his life as a living synonym for inspect.

I N S P E C T. Find out what it means to me.

Everyone at the facility knows him and he likes to think that they have developed a certain grudging respect for what he does.

And then he saw it in the break room. A table. The table. The edge of the table to be specific (and there’s very little he enjoys more than being specific). Little scratches and chips. Something you wouldn’t even notice unless you were looking for it.

Oh, he’s looking for it alright.

Somebody had opened the bottle by placing the cap at the edge of the table and then thrusting their hand down violently. No doubt a man. No doubt a man with no shirt sleeves or, he can picture this scenario as clearly as he can see his bushy mustache in the mirror, a man with the sleeves of his t-shirt rolled up and a pack of Camel cigarettes nestled therein.

A ne’er-do-well if he’d ever come upon one. Which he hadn’t, in the flesh anyway, but he’d seen pictures in his training class. Mostly biker bars. One slide in the presentation had a table edge so badly damaged that one of his classmates had to breathe into a brown paper bag to avoid fainting.

To know that this individual was still lurking in the building kept him up at nights.

A bottle cap opener is a force multiplier, i.e. it magnifies the force exerted by a person and tangentially focuses it on the edge of the bottle cap to pop it off. It is considered a second-class lever or a lever of second order. It is a tool, no different than an excavator or the space station, and deserves the proper respect.

That last sentence taken directly from his last safety briefing with the facility. Showing just how devil-may-care the employees had become towards the existential threat of taking such tools for granted, even his slide of the biker bar table edge did not have the impact he anticipated. Not a single attendee needed to use the brown paper bags he’d taken the time to hand out beforehand (beforehandout?).

Every year in the United Sates there are literally dozens of incidents where people are slightly injured attempting to open a bottle. With the right training and diligent inspection of the bottle openers in the facility, he sincerely believes that it’s not going to happen on his watch.

“Nope. Not on my watch.”

He carries in his pocket a bottle cap he found as a child. It was back when they printed things on the underside of the cap. His read “Today is the tomorrow we worried about yesterday.” He often finds himself running his finger around the 21 serrations to calm his nerves when a day gets particularly stressful.

Then It’s back to inspecting.

Endlessly observing.

Tirelessly examining. Bottles. Tables. Intentions.

The bottle cap inspector.