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When the iPhone first came out, some BlackBerry executives were apparently convinced it would flop. A phone with no physical keyboard? No one would want that, right? Well, fast forward a few years and we all know how that turned out.
That’s to say, sometimes the things that seem the most absurd end up being the most genius. We collected some great examples of exactly that from several Reddit threads where people shared the dumbest solutions to serious problems. Check them out below and upvote the most creative ones.
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#1
I remember reading this story about an assembly that would sometimes have empty boxes make it to the end of the line so they built this system that would weigh each box and beep if it was too light so an employee could come and retrieve the empty box and the employees got sick of having to stop what they were doing to deal with this so they just put a fan before the scale. The fan blew the empty boxes off the assembly line negating the very expensive weighing system.
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#2
We have an industrial printer at my work which had lost a small part which ruined the prints.
I folded a piece of paper a few times until it was roughly the same thickness of that plastic part and put that in.
This was 1,5 years ago and that small piece of paper is still in that printer, holding it together.
#3
I read a story a while back where this town was experiencing heavy flooding, and to build a new dam, construction companies were quoting several million dollars, so the town voted to bring a community of beavers to the area. The beavers built a completely natural dam in 2 days, all at almost no cost to the tax payers of the town.
#4
Someone got fed up with the number of unrepaired/ unpatched potholes in their area, so they started spray painting [private parts] around the potholes. The city would almost immediately come out to patch over the holes and remove the graffiti.
T'Mar of Vulcan 6 hours ago (edited)
LOL, like when there was a huge pothole at a some robots near where I live (guess my nationality by that word), and someone made a sign with the letters ANC on them and stuck them in the pothole. Fixed by week's end.
#5
Painting livestock like zebras to keep bugs from biting them. They do this on horses also.
#6
Idaho parachute beavers. In the 1940s Idaho built special boxes to parachute beavers deep into the wilderness to help restore the ecosystem. Worked great and only one fatality. Thet beaver passed away after chewing through his box and jumping into space.
#7
My doctor’s office had a cancellation fee of $100 if you did it on two days notice.
I realized I didn’t really need to go to the doctor so I asked, “So does it cost anything to reschedule?”
They said, “No not at all.”
So I rescheduled my appointment for two weeks out. Then I asked if I could cancel my appointment and the lady got a little pissy with me on the phone but allowed me to.
I think I exposed a slight loophole in their policy. A little shady on my part. But hey, I wanted to keep the $100.
#8
Warsaw used mussels as part of its water contamination warning system. They literally attached sensors to mussels and watched whether the shells suddenly snapped shut. If enough mussels closed at once, the system would trigger an alert.
#9
As the story goes. A semi-truck drove under a concrete bridge that wasn't tall enough & the truck got wedged under it. Backing up would cause more damage to the top of the trailer & going forward was a not going to happen. Pretty soon there were cops and the drivers boss standing around arguing about how to free up the trailer without causing more damage.
The solution offered by a young boy came in the form of a question, "Why don't you just let the air out of the tires?".
#10
A bridge was hit by a truck on the only hwy into the city with a large commuter population. Day 1 after was a [trainwreck] of trying to route people through a town to get back on after the bridge. My husband sat it in trying to get to the airport for 5 hours before giving up.
Someone on Reddit used MS paint to suggest basically making a makeshift on and off ramp to go around the bridge using the side street right off the side. Someone who knew someone commented they were going to move that idea up the chain. It was implemented within 48’s. I think day 1-2 it was taking people up to 6 hours to get through and once that was implemented it was reduced to only an hour or so longer than normal.
#11
I was a navigator in the air Force. One time the cooling fan on our inertial navigation system [stopped working]. I dug through the trash and pulled out all the empty water bottles and we cut the tops and bottoms off and duct taped them together. Then the pilot lowered the temperature and we duct tape one end to a vent and the other end to the intake for the cooling fan. It kept the system running and it saved the mission.
#12
This might be a bit different than the other answers here.
Accidentally wrote on a whiteboard using a permanent marker? No problem, write over it using a temporary marker, now it's erasable. Q.E.D.
I understand why it works, but I find it amusing as hell. Like something a kindergartener would come up with.
#13
The Al Kuwait salvage in 1964.
A large freighter ship carrying 5,000 sheep sank in the harbor of Kuwait City. The poor sheep's rotting carcasses could contaminate the city's drinking water, so they had to find a much faster way to get the ship up.
A Danish inventor named Karl Kroyer had seen a Donald Duck comic where Donald raised a sunken yacht by filling it with ping pong balls. Actual ping pong balls probably wouldn't work, but they DID order 27 million tiny, air-filled, polystyrene balls, which were pumped into the ship and displaced the water. It was a success!
#14
The paint on the Space Shuttle’s external fuel tank added about 600 pounds, and the engineers realized that the paint wasn’t necessary. Removing it added more payload capacity.
#15
Stick your finger in the hole... First aid for puncture with a big bleed and no packing.
#16
A long time ago, most cars used circulating water in radiators to cool the engines. These were semi-open systems that require radiators to be periodically topped up with water.
From time to time, a radiator may develop tiny holes or cracks so that the water leaked out. Obviously this will be bad because the engine will overheat, so the radiator need to be repaired or replaced, which will cost oodles of money.
In Malaysia at that time, some motorists used an extremely silly but kinda workable solution to fix a leaky radiator. They take cow dung (no kidding) and dropped that into the radiator. Apparently, the dung is made out of very fine particles and these will disperse themselves to fill and successfully clog up and stop the leaky bits. A radiator will then be sufficiently "fixed" to get a car moving to where it will need to go. This sounds like a temporarily solution, but it was actually used as a medium to long-term fix. Even mechanics will use this method for small leaks.
I assume that cow dung was more widely available to be easily at hand for use back then.
#18
I had a vacuum hose fall off my car, making it so it couldn't change gears. I jammed a short pencil in the hole and drove the car like that for 2 years.
B Parke 19 minutes ago
I had a speed sensor in my civic act up causing the speedometer not to work and also caused the VTEC not to engage properly. The female end of the harness was missing some of the metal tabs so it wasn't making contact. I twisted small pieces of foil and pushed them into the harness and then plugged it back in. It worked perfectly the rest of the time I owned that car.
#19
My old phones charging port was lose due to the REALLY cheap build quality, so i opened it up, put a small slice of an eraser between the port and the case, so there would be pressure on it, and boom, worked for another solid year until it finally stopped working and wasn't worth fixing.
#20
I stuck an umbrella through a hole in the roof to keep it from leaking. It worked, but it was really awkward looking from the street.
#21
Sugar cube vaccine for Polio.
Lauora 5 hours ago (edited)
Yes, I still remember having mine (early 1980s) and couldn't believe a Dr gave me a sugar cube as Drs were to keep you healthy. I was very confused. My Mum was strict about sugar. I was puzzled why she was happy about it. She has grown up with a friend who had long-term damage from Polio. Brain and mobility for all the anti-vax ignoramuses out there!
#22
The other day a couple guys came to my branch from a different branch to help us with a job. They brought a box truck with an electric lift gate, but we went to open the truck and found that the lift gate wasn't working. The guys never had this problem before and I'd never had to deal with this type of truck so we tried googling the problem. There's a relay or something connected to the batter that sometimes comes loose or something.. I didn't know what it was talking about and couldn't find what the picture was showing. It was pouring rain and we were out there for about 30 minutes trying to find a disconnected wire, checking fuses, etc.. Finally I called an old coworker who started troubleshooting with me. Then he paused and said, "wait... You did check to make sure the lift gate is turned on, right?" I told him we tried but there's no power. He said, "ya, but there's a cutoff switch in the cab of the truck on some models. Should be an after-market switch below the headlight switch."
Sure enough, someone turned the switch off. Flipped it on and the gate worked just fine. Our truck doesn't have that switch so I never considered it.
#23
The door to a freight elevator at work got stuck once. Latch was open and everything.
I wound up using a forklift to gently start pulling the door upward until it was sliding on its track like normal. Didn't have that problem again either.
#24
I was part of a marketing team that was seriously over budget at the end of fiscal. We were overspent by about 30K and absolutely had no way of recouping it. This was a “somebody is going to lose their job” situation. Everyone was sweating it out. We were trying to brainstorm a solution during a very long meeting and just as a joke I said “Just blame it on Skip. He’s gone.” (We had an Exec that just left for a competing company). The V.P. looked at me and said “That’s a great idea!” I thought he was being sarcastic and I started backpedaling. And he said “No, no that’s a GREAT idea.” Well they blamed it on good old Skip and it all worked out for us.
#25
I remember learning in grad school that Gumman spent a ton of time and money trying to develop a seating and restraint system for the LEM when they finally realized that a seat is overkill for lunar gravity and they just hooked onto a leaning bar instead. That's right, during descent and launch in the LEM the astronauts were standing.
#26
Me punching electronics to get them to work.... it fixes the problems more times than I like to admit.
#27
Before power bank, I bought an additional battery for my phone and swapped it in whenever charge was low.
Bill Swallow 9 hours ago
Yup. I had a couple of those Samsung batteries for my old Galaxy. And we *can't* do that any more because 'removable batteries would make the phones a few millimeters thicker! We can't possibly allow that! People would riot if their phones were thick enough to not bend in half in the customers' pocketses!'
#28
My friend stuck a squeaker chicken to his car to know when to stop. A couple of days later, all my friends with the car had such a modification.
#29
I spent 3 days taking apart my car to find a very minor clicking noise that happened at a certain speed. I'm not 100% sure what it was, but after taking apart half the dashboard and the passenger seat and putting them back, it was gone. Likely a loose wire or part that just vibrated at a certain frequency.
Bored Jellyfish 8 hours ago
Rattletrap Syndrome- a term coined by Click and Clack. Maybe someone else will get that reference.
#30
Scurvy is a horrible debilitating thing that can only be cured by [checks notes]...ah, eating a lemon.
#32
A group of intelligent craftsmen tried to build a car in their garage. All the intelligent minds missed out on one crucial dimension in their calculations,
The height of the door of the garage.
The car got engineered and built in no time as our fellows were quite industrious too.
When the time came for taking the car out for a test drive, the height of the door of the garage fell a few millimeters short of the roof of the car.
Intelligent as they were, each of them came up with quite a solution of their own.
The first fella said,
“Let us drive her out. If the roof gets scratched, let it be. We can always repaint the roof once she is outside.”
The second fella could not bear upon the idea of having the car scratched. He said,
“Lets break the door and get our baby out.”
“We must dismantle and reassemble her outside”, decided the Captain.
The gardener was listening to the conversation for quite a while. Quite deftly, he suggested,
Why don’t you try flattening the tires and try pushing her out?
On a heavier note,
No solution is dumb solution. We need to have the eyes to look out for that solution which actually works for us.
#33
Blood pressure reducer;
Grind up a garlic pod.
Add juice from three lemons is next.
Add that to a saucepan with a cup of water.
Boil that mix for one minute.
Let it cool down so you can drink that mixture.
The concoction works for about six hours.
#34
I recall reading how NASA spent tons of money developing a pen that could be used in space, whereas the Russians just used a pencil.
John Dilligaf 9 hours ago
an urban legend. --- Both U.S. astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts initially used pencils on space flights, but they weren't ideal: pencil tips can flake and break off. Having stuff like that floating around space capsules isn't good. ............... The so-called "space pen" was developed by the Fisher Pen Corporation on their own, using their own money, for their own reasons. After testing it NASA ended up buying some 400 of them (at wholesale price of around $3.00 per pen). The Russians also bought about 100 of them, plus 1000 replacement ink cartridges.
#35
Taking Bikini Bottom, and pushing it somewhere else.
#36
I have this weird habit of singing Eminem, Taylor Swift and Freddie Mercury's song loud in my house which kicks the hell outta my mother.
She finds this very stupid coz English songs make her really frustrated.
But one day she started singing random English words with the same tune imitating me which frustrated me as hell.
I stopped singing !
PEACE OUT
#37
In Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, there's a tile called a Muddy Slope. If you go up the tile without a Mach Bike, you'll fall back down and the game will register 1 step. I built an arm out of Legos that was weighted at one end. This way, I could keep the UP direction on my Game Boy Advance pressed indefinitely.
Since the Day-Care experience and hatching Eggs is based on steps, I was able to knock out millions of steps without having to actually be there playing the game.
Nik Odongray 8 hours ago
My wife bought this little contraption for Pokémon go. It’s a cradle for the phone that uses rubber bands and a little more to keep it rocking indefinitely, getting steps and hatching eggs.
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T'Mar of Vulcan 6 hours ago
In South Africa we say, " 'n Boer maak 'n plan." (A farmer makes a plan.) Even if we're not Afrikaans or even pale in complexion.
David Paterson 10 minutes ago (edited)
The F-111 comes to mind. The US sold Australia fighter aircraft that looked great on paper. The wings kept falling off in flight, which wasn't fair because the wings falling off wasn't mentioned in the specs. The Australians solved it by drilling holes in the wings to stop fatigue cracks from travelling forwards. Counterintuitive, but it worked. And it's now standard practise on many aircraft to drill holes to stop fatigue cracks
T'Mar of Vulcan 6 hours ago
In South Africa we say, " 'n Boer maak 'n plan." (A farmer makes a plan.) Even if we're not Afrikaans or even pale in complexion.
David Paterson 10 minutes ago (edited)
The F-111 comes to mind. The US sold Australia fighter aircraft that looked great on paper. The wings kept falling off in flight, which wasn't fair because the wings falling off wasn't mentioned in the specs. The Australians solved it by drilling holes in the wings to stop fatigue cracks from travelling forwards. Counterintuitive, but it worked. And it's now standard practise on many aircraft to drill holes to stop fatigue cracks
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