Corkscrew

I went to a language party last night organised through the people i am doing my Japanese course with. The idea is you go along and practice speaking your chosen subject with foreign students learning English. It would have been good, but about 10 English speakers learning Japanese turned up and only 1 Japanese speaker came. Anyway, to encourage people to come they offered a free glass of wine. I was the first person to arrive who asked for wine and so they asked me to open the bottle. That should be no problem I thought and got involved in opening the bottle. I was provided with a plastic corkscrew that goes down over the top of the bottle and when you screw it in the arms come up. I put it on and started screwing. The arms weren't coming up very high and there was some resistance but i persevered. I kept turning until something made a snapping noise. At this point I backtracked and tried to get the corkscrew out. It turned out there was already a cork in the corkscrew. It took me a couple of minutes to separate everything and then the whole corkscrew fell apart. They had to search the building for another corkscrew so nobody got any wine for the first 15 minutes of the hour long evening...