Second was a fellow I know who was driving his antique VW beetle when the throttle cable broke. The engine is in the back on these cars, which means the throttle cable ran forward under the floor boards before entering the passenger compartment to connect with the accelerator pedal.
So he fished the broken end of the cable up through a hole in the floor (I guess where the parking brake comes in?), and then tied it around his tire iron and wedged one end of the tire iron against the floor. Presto: now he had a hand-operated throttle. Steer with left hand, accelerate with right hand until it’s time to shift; release tire iron, shift, grab tire iron and resume acceleration. He made it home without further incident.
Friend locks her keys in the ignition, leaving the car running and the window open a crack. We get a hanger and try to use it to pull the door opener on the side of the armrest.
I look at the armrest, notice the window opener on the top of it, and ask “Wouldn’t it be easier to get a branch and push the window opener to open the window and then open the door from the inside?”
My old pickup had these really flimsy vacuum lines that controlled among other things, the EGR valve, and that particular line developed a crack one day, and the engine started running rough, and I checked the code, and figured out that it was a problem with the vacuum line going to the EGR valve. I went to the local parts store, but they didn’t stock that kind of line with the particular weird rubber connector, and I didn’t want to drive 15 miles to go to the dealership that day, so I cut the line, put a piece of heat-shrink tubing on it to seal it back together, and splinted the thing with a popsicle stick so that it wouldn’t bend where the heat-shrink tubing was.
That repair ended up working for at least 5 more years until I sold the pickup.