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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Stick your finger in the hole... First aid for puncture with a big bleed and no packing.

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?".

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.

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.

My dad told me of this one time he went to my mom's work Christmas party, (she was a banker). As the bankers talked shop and tried to sound impressive, the spouses grew bored and talked among themselves. The guy who drew the biggest crowd was this man who worked at a toilet factory and he did quality control. His job was to flush toilet paper and simulated p**p down the toilet. The people at the party, (especially the men) were riveted by his descriptions and peppered him with questions while all these upper management bankers looked on with irritation.

I used to digitize my local newspaper's old photo negatives for the local archives. I got to see the most amazing snapshots of everyday life, and how my hometown lived through and reacted to major world events, such as the world wars and the rise of technology and innovation.

It was a great job and I got to bring the pup to work.

Concrete petrographer. I just started this month. I studied geology in college and now my job is to look at concrete using petrographic methods I learned at school and conduct ASTM tests to determine quality of concrete. Very interesting work because concrete is engineered rock and there’s A LOT more to it than you think.

From 15-18 I worked at a glorious dog daycare in a huge air conditioned building. With so many dogs

I worked for them 21 years ago, and they're still thriving. I see employees around town wearing the shirts

Pay me to pet dogs? How could you say no.

I work in a lab where I raise moths! I got it by telling my lab partner that I love bugs and he hooked me up.

I am studying conservation and restoration of patrimony. I have entered to tombs with archeologists and I am the one who get the bones out, stabilize them and make them presentable for museums. Also I worked in a church, I had complete access to all the rooms, so there are like hidden halls and basements and it's usual to find skeletons or ancient things in there, the atmosphere is quite creepy, humid and dark.

I recently started working in a carrot factory. I stand at a conveyor belt as carrots roll past me and pick out all of the mouldy ones. How did end up in this job you ask? I decided to do an arts degree and now have no career prospects.


In all seriousness though, I work with a lot of migrant workers who work extremely hard doing a job they are accused of “coming to this country and stealing”. They are lovely people who take a lot of care while dealing with the food products and they deserve all the respect in the world for continuing to work hard during the pandemic.

Ooh, I love medical ghost stories! I could write a book on all the ones I've heard over the years. This is one that happened on a unit I worked in about a year ago. For reference, I believe in ghosts and the supernatural. I'm also very pragmatic about my approach to them. But this one is weird.

Note: All identifying information has been changed for confidential purposes.

In the unit I worked in, we used cordless phones to communicate. The shift was winding down and I was just d*****g around on my cell phone. I get a call from the Covid Unit.

"Hey, it's Kim. Are you busy?"
"Nah, just k*****g time until Days gets here. What's up?"
"The call light for 512 keeps going off."
[pregnant pause] "So... answer it."
[whisper] "There's no one in 512..."
"Huh, that is weird. Yeah, I'll come over and check it out."

I tell my charge I'm leaving the floor because Kim is having a call light issue in Covid. I always hated working the Covid Unit because of its location. You had to walk down an empty hallway and it felt like a world away. Usually, it's only staffed by a nurse +1 (nurse-nurse, nurse-aide), furthering the feeling of isolation.

I get to the unit and have them show me to the room. Kim and her aide (an equally scared aide in her late teens/early 20s). I tell them to stay with me in case something happens. We've had people sneak into the hospital at night and steal things. I wasn't about to get attacked so close to the end of my shift.

I walk into the room, with Kim and the aide hovering at the door. Kim reaches in and shuts the call light off from the unit on the wall by the door. The room looks like it hasn't been touched recently. It still looks cleaned by EVS. I turn all the lights on and loudly announce my presence. I say don't want to harm anyone, or be harmed, but if there's someone here to show themselves. I say this as I'm turning on lights, checking the bathroom, closets, etc. I get to the foot of the bed, and the call light goes off. I stare at it lying on the bed.

"Pull it out of the wall!" I heard Kim exclaim behind me. So I do and lay the cord on the bed, shutting off the call light from the wall by the bed. It goes off again, Kim and Aide squeal and runs away. So much for backup.

I walk out of the room and close the door. I walk to the desk, "Call Maintenance and tell them you have a faulty light. Tell Days about it so they don't freak out." And I walk back to my unit.

The next day, the unit is being staffed by Janice and Jordan. Both are really smart and experienced nurses. Janice was my preceptor and has a very no-nonsense attitude (which is why I like her). She and Jordan were working in separate rooms, and "STAFF EMERGENCY RM 512" rings on Janice's phone. Our locator badges had a single button on them. I called them "crisis buttons". You hit them and everyone's phone lights up (basically an "all come" alert).

Janice runs into 512, no one's there. But through the wall, she hears Jordan working in 511. She walks into 511 and Jordan's in the middle of med pass. "Were you in 512?" "No, I've been in here for the past 10 minutes," Janice explains to her about the staff emergency alert, but they chalk it up to the faulty call light situation.

Later Jordan is sitting at the desk charting, chatting with the charge nurse. Her phone rings, but the Caller ID is a jumbled mess of letters and numbers. Before she can answer it, it stops ringing. She calls the number back and it rings to the desk phone sitting just out of arm's reach.

She tells Janice about it and Janice says, "Wait... Henry died in the room last week." In relaying this story, Janice told me she had enough of this BS and stormed into the room. "Henry, I understand you're trying to go home. If you follow me, I can lead you out." She walked out of the room and to the nearby stairwell, held the door open for a couple of minutes, and walked back to the desk. And there wasn't a problem afterward.

I'm a believer that spirits, at least the non-violent ones, are simply trying to complete a task. When that task is done, they leave. I thought about it later when telling Kim this second part that Henry just needed help leaving. And what do we tell our patients to do when they need our help? Press their call light.