I paid my power bill today in person. While there, as the woman was keying in my check, I happened to notice their receipt tape: wide and white, with yellow NCR paper on the second layer.
“I knew a guy who worked in a place with receipt tape like that,” I said, half-jokingly. “He said they were shipped a bunch of receipt tape that was wound backwards.”
“Really?” she asked. “I think we got some of that shipped here, too.”
I asked her to show it to me, and sure enough, the yellow paper was wound around as the top layer, and underneath that was the white. Backwards, just as my friend John had described to me.
I tore off one layer of yellow paper, all the way around the circumference. Like magic, the white layer was now on top, with yellow underneath. I couldn’t have shocked her more had I been performing sleight-of-hand card tricks.
The woman stared at the restored receipt tape as if I’d just pulled an ice-skating mongoose out of her ear. “How did you do that?”
Who else has a good story about that moment where you can see somebody’s lightbulb go off?
I did pretty much the same as you with a roll of two-ply toilet paper; my dad was about to unroll and re-roll the whole thing, because the perforations were not aligned; I just peeled off one ply all the way around and suddenly it was fixed.
On a more mundane and boring level (but still generating the same sort of reaction), I solve about 20% of hardware support issues (mostly printers and scanners) by introducing the users to a power switch or a cable that has been knocked loose. Last week though, it was showing someone where the <F7> key was; the application was telling her to press <F7> to continue, but it wasn’t working because she was pressing F, then 7.
Then there’s the time when I was out with a friend, waiting for his girlfriend and her mother to return home.
They returned in an old 1960’s-style 4-door death ray sedan, and rather than open the driver’s door, they both slid out the front passenger door.
“There’s no knob on the driver’s side,” they explained. “You have to unlock it with a key. We just leave it locked and use the other door.”
So I unscrewed one of the locks from the rear passenger door — they were the kind that screwed down onto a threaded stud, out of sight in the door panel — and screwed it onto the stud of the driver’s door.
They had this look of “why didn’t we think of that?”