Engineering
A friend of mine is an excellent DIY engineer who can creatively fix all kinds of things. He's okay with me sharing this story with you (He reads this blog, Hi, Adrian!)
"You might be interested to hear the saga of our neighbourhood Christmas emergency: it all began on the Friday before Christmas week, when the local butcher's vacuum bag-sealing machine packed up. With all his Christmas stock waiting to be vacuum packed, that was a major catastrophe. We eventually tracked the fault down to a problem in the pneumatic cylinder that pinched the bag seal shut. The diaphragm was torn, so I ordered a new one and then received an e-mail to say it would be out of stock until the New Year;
To get the machine going again, I dismantled the cylinder and after a lot of trial and error found that a patch cut from a condom was flexible enough to stretch as the diaphragm rolled. We got the machine working again and by Monday morning his shop display was full of vacuum-sealed packs.
I had bought the packet of condoms from the newspaper shop (the chemist was shut on Saturday) and on my way back past the butcher's shop, I attracted the attention of his sister, who was serving, and held the packet up to the shop window. She burst out with hysterical laughter and called out something to her brother, who also doubled-up with laughter.
At that point I realised that the mystified-looking customer at the counter was my next-door-neighbour.
(I have since seen her and offered an explanation, but she said there was no need, as the butcher's sister had told her what was happening at the time.)"
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