A Sticky Screw-Up

It’s a rainy Tuesday in December, and as such, the golf club bar is completely deserted and has been for a while.

In between bouts of chatting and chilling out, my coworker, our manager, and I have been doing various administrative and cleaning tasks around the place. Currently, we are just finishing with cleaning the lines to the beer taps.

As the keg is reconnected and we begin to pull fresh beer through the newly clean pipes, I notice that a fixing on the tap is loose and begin to tighten it up.

Anyone who has ever tightened anything with a threaded bolt has likely heard the helpful phrase “righty-tighty, lefty-loosey,” which lets you know which way to turn the thing depending on what you want to achieve.

Unfortunately, this particular fixing is reverse-threaded. I twist it a quarter turn to the right, which is enough to completely undo the fixing, and the top of the tap falls off.

The section that falls off contains the valve that stops the beer from flowing unless the tap is opened. This becomes apparent when a geyser of lager sprays forth from the remaining section of the tap, covering me, the ceiling, the bar, and the floor in amber goodness.

I yell for my colleague to first pass me several jugs and then to run upstairs and disconnect the keg while I catch the fountain in the jugs I’ve been given.

Eventually, the keg is disconnected and the torrent subsides. So, I’m standing there, shirt transparent with beer, with more of it puddling around my feet and all over the bar, when our first golfers for several hours enter.

“So, the beer’s off, then?” one of them asks.

Happily, my sense of humour hasn’t completely deserted me, and I’m able to chuckle in response, before the manager comes back into the room to relieve me to go home and change my clothes.

When I return, the tap has been reassembled and a sticker has been applied to the main section, just above the offending fixing, reading:

“Caution: unscrews to the right!”