37 Times People Threw Logic Out The Window And Solved Serious Problems With Pure Stupidity

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.

Someone got fed up with the number of unrepaired/ unpatched potholes in their area, so they started spray painting [private parts] around the potholes. The city would almost immediately come out to patch over the holes and remove the graffiti.

Idaho parachute beavers. In the 1940s Idaho built special boxes to parachute beavers deep into the wilderness to help restore the ecosystem. Worked great and only one fatality. Thet beaver passed away after chewing through his box and jumping into space.

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.

We have an industrial printer at my work which had lost a small part which ruined the prints.

I folded a piece of paper a few times until it was roughly the same thickness of that plastic part and put that in.

This was 1,5 years ago and that small piece of paper is still in that printer, holding it together.

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.

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?".

Painting livestock like zebras to keep bugs from biting them. They do this on horses also.

My doctor’s office had a cancellation fee of $100 if you did it on two days notice.

I realized I didn’t really need to go to the doctor so I asked, “So does it cost anything to reschedule?”

They said, “No not at all.”

So I rescheduled my appointment for two weeks out. Then I asked if I could cancel my appointment and the lady got a little pissy with me on the phone but allowed me to.

I think I exposed a slight loophole in their policy. A little shady on my part. But hey, I wanted to keep the $100.

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!

The paint on the Space Shuttle’s external fuel tank added about 600 pounds, and the engineers realized that the paint wasn’t necessary. Removing it added more payload capacity.

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.

Turn it off turn it back on again.

The other day a couple guys came to my branch from a different branch to help us with a job. They brought a box truck with an electric lift gate, but we went to open the truck and found that the lift gate wasn't working. The guys never had this problem before and I'd never had to deal with this type of truck so we tried googling the problem. There's a relay or something connected to the batter that sometimes comes loose or something.. I didn't know what it was talking about and couldn't find what the picture was showing. It was pouring rain and we were out there for about 30 minutes trying to find a disconnected wire, checking fuses, etc.. Finally I called an old coworker who started troubleshooting with me. Then he paused and said, "wait... You did check to make sure the lift gate is turned on, right?" I told him we tried but there's no power. He said, "ya, but there's a cutoff switch in the cab of the truck on some models. Should be an after-market switch below the headlight switch."

Sure enough, someone turned the switch off. Flipped it on and the gate worked just fine. Our truck doesn't have that switch so I never considered it.

I stuck an umbrella through a hole in the roof to keep it from leaking. It worked, but it was really awkward looking from the street.

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 was a navigator in the air Force. One time the cooling fan on our inertial navigation system [stopped working]. I dug through the trash and pulled out all the empty water bottles and we cut the tops and bottoms off and duct taped them together. Then the pilot lowered the temperature and we duct tape one end to a vent and the other end to the intake for the cooling fan. It kept the system running and it saved the mission.

Sugar cube vaccine for Polio.

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