I wouldn't call it personal genius, but here's my MacGyver story....
Several years ago, I worked at a grooming shop and pet supply store. One evening when things had been fairly slow and I was mostly reading the paper and waiting for closing time, a young man came in with one of those retractable leashes. His had, as is the way of such things, stopped retracting or pulling out beyond a certain point and now was an awkwardly long non retractable leash that was too thin to comfortably wrap around your hand when you need your dog closer.
He asked if there was anything I could “do about it”. I asked when he bought it, trying to figure if I could exchange it and send it back to the company for a refund. Oh, he didn’t actually buy it here, he just hoped I could help him. Had he tried contacting the company to see if he could send it in for a replacement? He obviously didn’t want to go to that hassle. Finally, he plaintively asked, “Can’t you just MacGyver it?”
Well, I am inclined to look favorably upon anyone who uses MacGyver as a verb, not to mention a man who is secure enough in his masculinity to ask a woman to fix the mechanical device which is confounding him. So I relented and whipped out my Swiss army knife, giving him the perfunctory warning that I was possibly going to ruin it rather than fixing it. He was willing to take the chance, and I got the weird triangle-box screws out with the tiny screwdriver tool and checked out the insides. It turned out that an over enthusiastic retraction had ended up with the cord layers lightly twisted around each other, which had tightened into a knot as he tugged harder and harder to get it to come out. I picked the knot apart, unwound and rewound the spool, reset the retraction button that had gotten wedged wrong with all the yanking and put it back together to return a working leash.
I suppose I could have sold him a new leash instead and made a profit off the encounter, but isn’t a random good deed just as much of a MacGyver as a jury rigged fix?
PS, the page won't load for me.
edit, finally loaded.
