What's The Dumbest Solution To A Problem That Actually Worked? r/AskReddit Reddit Stories Top Posts

what is the dumbest solution to a problem that actually worked napoleon's army gaining control of an area by pretending that the war was over added for those that are entrusted apparently napoleon's army was having great difficulty conquering the austrians who had a strong defensive position along the danube the only access to the area was over the table bridge that the austrians had wired with explosives two of napoleon's marshals with a few grenadiers decided to walk towards the bridge bearing white flags and laughing as they neared the bridge and while obviously acquiring the attention of the austrians they yelled out that they had been assigned armistice truce the marshals were so convincing that the austrians literally threw all the explosives into the water the austrian commander hearing news of this armistice decided to head to the bridge after witnessing both the french and the austrian armies standing together he had no choice but to believe that the war was indeed over as a result he handed the bridge and the area over to the french moments later the austrian commander and his army were astounded to find themselves prisoners to the french [Music] my car got pummeled in a terrible hail storm little dents over every surface of the car my insurance would only write it off as a total loss and i didn't want to give the car up a friend pointed out that since i live in the desert the heat will likely fix a lot of those dents over time that's exactly what happened a year later you had to look carefully to find dents where there used to be a hundred of them ignoring the problem fixed it drove to a neighboring town 80 miles away with one burned-out headlight remaining headlight went out while in said town i had no money and shops were closed regardless these were dual beam so although i had lost both headlights the high beams worked i didn't make it out of town with getting honked at and flashed repeatedly by angry passing motorists and understandably so what was i to do i continued down the highway and made it about 15 miles before i'm pulled over by the first officer to see me i explained the situation officer has no suggestions this was before cell phones tells me i can go but that i won't make it home without getting stopped again i pull over at the next exit get a free water dump it in the dirt make a thin mud and smeared it over my lights work like a charm no more honks or flashes passed multiple officers i went to cancel a doctor's appointment and they said it was a 200 charge without a week's notice i asked how much it was to reschedule they said it was free okay so i need to reschedule for two weeks out is three weeks okay yep all right you're all set for three weeks from now anything else i can do for you yes i need to cancel my appointment we need a week's notice my appointment is three weeks away oh okay sure thank you couldn't believe it worked edit well crap my most upvoted comment is a story about me conning some poor receptionist i'm a schmuck i bought a set of couches from art van furniture this summer complete with 24-hour warranty and replacement service once delivered i discovered that one of the legs arrived cracked i spent some time on the phone with their customer service hotline only to get 15 minutes worth of run around i decided to go back to the store with the broken leg in hand and just get a replacement the customer service desk told me there was no way i could just get an extra leg from the store i would need to file a claim over the phone have my invoice number etc etc i realized that i was dressed about the same as the delivery guys so i walked into the loading bay and told the first guy i saw that i need another leg to match this one he didn't ask any questions just took one off of another matching couch and handed it to me adam edit i was wearing the same thing that i wear every day gray levy gray work shirt while my experience was a bummer i'll tolerate some customer service dummies for the sake of supporting local jobs any day one of my friends is a teacher and he was finding it hard to deal with his kids dabbing in class so he started doing it in a super white dude awkwardly trying to fit in with no rhythm way the kids stopped a tick crawled into the headphone jack of my phone the next two searches on my phone were what eats ticks guinea handmating noises after about 15 seconds of female guinea hen sounds the tick crawled out of my phone i couldn't connect to the wi-fi my wi-fi adapter wasn't working right and wouldn't connect to anything so i right clicked on the adapter in the control panel click diagnose and windows fixed it automatically only time i have seen it work had to send in a letter once the envelopes had no sticky adhesive and couldn't find the tape at home my dad who's pretty much as old as confucius just grabs a grain of rice out of my bowl and used it as the adhesive it worked so well edit since people keep asking it was just cooked white rice i was eating for dinner my psych professor told us about this patient she was a woman in her late 40s suffering from ocd and paranoia every day while she drove to work she would panic that she left her curling iron on and it was going to burn her house down so she would turn around drive home make sure it was unplugged and then leave again but as time went on she started making multiple trips home sometimes in the middle of the day and she was about to lose her job over this no therapy was working her medications weren't working coping techniques weren't working nothing could calm this woman then she saw my professor and my professor told her to bring her curling iron in the car with her so if she got nervous that it was still plugged in she could look over and see that it was next to her edit my professor told this story in such a way as if she was treating the patient but this is actually a pretty famous case prof was using it to talk about treatment methods my bad for wording an officially recommended solution to a common problem with the apple 3 was to lift the computer two inches and drop it swedish mail train were cursive wore skirts to beat the heat because the company's dress code prohibited shorts this made it into the news and the company changed its dress code to allow shorts source nurses here will recognize this one once i was dealing with an extremely agitated and fearful alzheimer's patient who had been sundowning since 3 p.m sundowning is an occurrence in some alzheimer's patients where their mental function gets worse and worse as the day goes on once it starts to get dark in a hoe this sweet old lady was having an absolute fit all through my shift night shift yay i was running in and out of her room the bed alarm kept going off she was so confused afraid i desperately wanted her to go to sleep mind you i had seven other patients i finally walk her out to the nurse's station and plop her down in a seat next to me while i do my chatting she is yelling at me and throwing things i've had it at this point and i'm running out of ideas i finally look at her and say how will i ever finish with a wash my husband will be so mad when he gets home would you help me finish he looks me right in the eye clear as day and says dammit sister don't you ever learn give me that laundry haha so i grab a stack of folded towels and mess them up real quick and plop them in front of her she folded all of them i would say oh look at that she turned around and i would mess the towels up again this went on a few times until this sweet lady just passed out exhausted from being so worked up earlier and maybe from all the towel folding i slowly push her in the desk chair down the hall and gently get her back into bed she started to wake up and i leaned down and whispered all the wash is done you have nothing else to worry about he slept throughout the night we were both happy i am the grandma whisperer back in the day hitting a tv or other appliance to make it work hell even today it still works sometimes during world war ii a bomber made of wood designed to outrun enemy fighters despite struggling to convince the british air ministry of the potential for such a design eventually the project got off the ground and created the de havilland mosquito which was used as a bomber fighter knight fighter and a variety of other roles i'll let herman gehring do the talking more than in 1940 i could at least fly as far as glasgow and most of my aircraft but not now it makes me furious when i see the mosquito i turn green and yellow with envy the british who can afford aluminium better than we can knock together a beautiful wooden aircraft that every piano factory over there is building and they give it a speed which they have now increased yet again what do you make of that there is nothing the british do not have they have the geniuses and we have the nincompoops after the war is over i'm going to buy a british radio set then at least i'll own something that has always worked it's not done now but back in the 1850s when jon snow went around telling everybody that the london cholera outbreak was being caused by a water pump it was seen as pretty ridiculous back then the leading theory on the cause of disease was that diseases were caused by miasmas or bad air jon snow realized everybody that was getting cholera was also visiting this one water pump so he got the city to replace it lo and behold the cholera outbreak stopped nowadays doing this would probably be on par with suggesting you could stop alzheimer's by sleeping without a pillow or something edit people keep complaining because this is a short and sweet summary of what happened so if you want a more in-depth analysis about this event snow's methods and its importance in modern day epidemiology and public health check this out our family cat hated our family dog rubbed the dog all over with fresh catnip new best friends bought a not chargeable iphone 5s from a second hand store for bargain used a toothpick to clean the contact phone is chargeable now and works perfectly my sister was hospitalized at four years old for a build-up of fluid in her head she refused to drink any of the milk being offered by the hospital because it didn't have the cow and sunglasses on the side of the box that the other hospital's milk had her being a sick child in for literal brain surgery the hospital went above and beyond sending someone to the local grocery store to try and find this milk brand with the cow wearing sunglasses when they never found it i googled the image asked if they had a printer and taped the cow to the side of their milk carton i still think it's adorable that worked we had a problem with an order so i wrote an email from my email address to customer support asking them on how to proceed they told me that since the order was done in my girlfriend's name they couldn't give me this information for privacy reasons so i just replied still from my email address with more than i hereby allow fragrant vegetable to inquire information about my order more than more than regards more than less than insert girlfriend's name harimur then apparently that was proof enough for them to give me said information which actually was just to call a certain number why that information fell under their privacy policy in the first place is still a mystery to me when applying for college they never sent me my student id with my student number and everything i needed i call in and they made a big deal about having to fill out forms and get approval from someone and all sorts of bullet so i just walked into the front desk and said i lost it they printed a new id and gave me my number right then on the spot there was a nursing home in germany and the patients with dementia kept wandering off they installed a fake bus stop in front of the nursing home so when dementia and patients got out of the building they would go sit at the fake bus stop and wait for the non-existent bus the bus stop was clearly visible from the main offices so whenever staff saw someone out there they would just go and retrieve them solved the problem completely several months ago i was working in an iq when a pipe burst in the ceiling and began to leak into my patient's room the supervisor's solution was move him into the hall however that would have killed this particular patient thankfully it had been a rainy weekend so i propped my umbrella up on the patient and the water ran off harmlessly into the floor the surgeon had a tiny heart attack when he saw it a bit later but he got over it i suppose wrapping your xbox 360 in a towel and leaving it turned on caused some of the it connections on wiring to res alder themselves if you had the ring of death something daft like that anyway dudes pissing absolutely everywhere in the bathroom where i once worked so the janitor put a little red sticker in each toilet and suddenly the problem stopped apparently men will aim at a target 100 of the time if a target is presented restarting a computer does so much the americans were trying to figure out the best way to destroy the mostly wooden buildings in japan a pioneering scientist decided that by strapping thermite to bats and releasing them over the city during daytime the bats would go roost and the rafters of the wooden buildings then catch them all on fire the problem was this dumb idea was too effective a bat container came open at an air base in new mexico and the bats subsequently destroyed all the hangars the army decided that the bat bombs were too dangerous to use edit it's been brought to my attention that the nuclear bombs development rendered bat bombs useless so it's not because it was too dangerous edit two for additional clarity thermite is basically molten iron that will burn straight through stuff termites are little bugs that probably would have destroyed japan given enough time but no termites were harmed in the creation of the bat bomb edit 3 video of thermite destroying a car duct tape occlusion therapy if you've got a wart or a verucca stick a piece of duct tape over it and replace the tape every time it falls off for two weeks or so it sounds like it's bullet like the windex from my big fat greek wedding and i have no idea how why it works but it's cheap painless and has worked for me and everyone i've recommended it to including once on a veruca that i'd had for almost a decade so it seems unlikely to me that it's just a coincidence of course if you admit it in public you sound like the crazy lady at the end of the street who thinks tinfoil hats will keep the government mind raised out back when i was in sixth form at school we had new sofas in the common room a room where our year could hang out and relax work listen to music on our time off they had been there only a couple of days before one of the legs snapped off one of the sofas now we could have attempted to fix it or just left it missing a leg but there were often checks and cleaners moving furniture would have noticed it was broken and we would have got in trouble for not respecting school property so we did the only sensible thing which was break all the legs off the sofa and then all the sofas in the room so they were all at the same height we stashed the legs in the ceiling and nobody knew a thing we were overhauling a centrifugal pump to replace the wearings it's a pretty standard thing but for some reason when we reassembled it the impeller wasn't rotating we checked for the shaft key and if it was coupled to the motor properly all fine after two hours of trying everything possible the trainee engineer just said what if we hit it with something we hit the casing with a sledgehammer a few times not too hard the casing is made of cast iron the ducking thing starts working tldr hit thing with hammer when not work makes it work edit impeller not guide vanes my house is about 100 years old with a basement and the basement windows are just as old a basement window kept popping open and they opened to the inside i noticed there were a few left over 20 feet pieces of wood trim never used so i placed one end on the bottom part of the window frame bent the trim so it bows and stuck the other end in the corner of the wall opposite it holds true and fits like a glove that was four years ago and i promised myself i'm going to fix it properly tomorrow astronomer here i went to high school with the daughter of an astronaut who went up a few times in the 90s on the space shuttle when asked what the craziest thing was that happened on his missions he said that once they lost complete communications with houston they knew why on their end but couldn't explain the problem to houston to get it fixed then one of the astronauts up there remembered the ham radio see it's pretty standard for manned space missions to carry one so astronauts can do outreach events with it talk to school children and the like during scheduled events there's even one on the ice but there's no reason you can't just use it for regular communication too and they were over the indian ocean coming up on australia so maybe they could contact a ham radio operator there i just love to imagine what it was like to be the aussie when he established the contact of his life hey buddy listen we need you to call nasa and tell them but hey it worked colin tapping on the guidance computer during the apollo 11 moon landing ignoring it and hoping it goes away worked with those creepy murder clowns last year blowing into a nintendo cartridge to get the game to work stabbing yourself in the leg with a pen to get out of a horribly boring sales meeting [Music] that one time someone scored a touchdown by pretending to be just walking link i was at a hotel on a floor close to the top but not at the top there were many people leaving from the levels above and as a result it would take about three minutes or so for one person from our level to get onto the elevator there was also a guy with a cart loaded with a giant suitcase attempting to go down and would not let anyone else who could potentially be able to fit onto the elevator get on i had to leave within a few minutes or i would miss the bus which was heading to the airport and thus miss the plane i proposed the stupid idea of going up as everyone was waiting for the elevator to go down and from there we would be able to skip the queue and go all the way down it worked and luckily it did not stop at the original floor we were on as the guy with the cart would probably not be too happy dumbass program director of our hospital decided for patient safety there should be no abbreviations in patients charts and record that goes for turbt lavh surgical jargons that doesn't make sense to lay people which kind of makes sense i guess then he went overboard and started to ask everyone to write out full names for cancer markers and lab data in their units it worked he was let go i've got a buddy that designs mainframes and he's also an avid gamer for years he'd just build a new gaming pc if any part of his failed and he'd give me the old system to fix up because it'd be a huge upgrade for me for the price of whatever broke plus swapping in the hdd this particular system's gpu failed so he gave me that one and ordered parts to build a new system few nights later he calls me because he can't get the new system to do anything and asked me if i could bring the old system back to use it to test out his new parts i pack everything up and head over when i arrive he's got it stripped down to sue cpu motherboard and ram hitting the power button did absolutely nothing so he was thinking it was a defective sue but asks what i think i start thinking of the circuit the power takes and asked if he tested the power button it was a new case too and he was completely shocked at the thought that the button might not work i pull the power jumper from the board short the pins with my car key and it booted right up one of the wires for the button wasn't soldered in properly and the solder joint cracked i once owned a subaru and drove a half hour away to a friend's house on the way home the brakes lost all their fluid when i stepped on the brake pedal the car just coasted this was in the middle of a blizzard nobody else was on the road so in my head it made the most logical sense to drive at home right then and there rather than wait for a tow truck during a blizzard i took back roads and stayed in first or second gear 20 miles per hour at most and break to a stop with the emergency brake it was really easy and retrospect dumb but easy this falls in the edge someone else never thought of category in the last century i worked for a major film and tv sound studio in hollywood as the lowly receptionist one fine day a transformer and some other stuff in the neighborhood blew out and that entire neck of hollywood went dark in the smb highland neighborhood just boom no more electricity all gone for miles around in those days most businesses didn't have backup generators and this was a big industrial building so everyone is frantic hundreds of thousands of bucks an hour being lost the electric co was saying it could be days before it was restored it was down for three days the building engineers are standing around scratching heads company president is in a panic as shows are trying to book time in other competitors sound base it was a mess i called my buddies a show power an entertainment group that provides big stand-alone power rigs generators on semi trucks to gigantic music events i put them on the phone to the building engineer and bang they had a big rig power plant on site in an hour i saved the day and saved the studio millions in billable hours never got a word of thanks for it either the guys all took the credit of course side note i toured for years with those gigantic rock and roll shows as one of the few chick roadies as a loader rigger lights and electrics tech and stagehand those were good times with great stories getting onto the nj turnpike once there was an attendant at each both handing out something to each driver i assume that meant the machines that issued tickets indicating where you got them were broken turns out they were handing out pamphlets advertising easy pass and i had skipped the functioning ticket machine by turnpike rules i would have to pay the full fee as though i had driven the entire length as i approached my exit i came up with a stupid plan act stupid when i pulled up to the tollbooth window i said against every grammatical fiber in my being i ain't got no ticket the attendant rolled her eyes and asked where i had entered playing dumb saved me about five dollars more than prior to the second world war the british government was attempting to determine a good way to defend britain from german attacks someone sent them the suggestion that they develop a death ray for shooting down german bombers oddly enough someone looked into it decided that electromagnetic rays couldn't destroy bombers but someone else realized that radio waves fired into the air would bounce off german bombers and help the defenders to detect them so a screwball death ray idea led to the invention of radar my folks were in town and my wife and i wanted to take them to dinner we head to a nearby mediocre steakhouse at the request of my parents and it's around 6 p.m the hostesses tell us there's a minimum 45 minute wait i get suspicious as their parking lot had barely any cars so i peek around into their dining area there are several open tables that would fit a party of four mildly annoyed i ask the hostesses why we can't be seated at any of these tables they reply that they're being held for future reservations i get on my smartphone open the open table app make a reservation for 6 15 pm for a party of four and we're seated immediately one of the greatest inventions probably sounded very dumb at the time 1796 when smallpox killed 10 percent of the population a man thought how about i take the gardener's eight-year-old boy and inject him with cow pox he probably saved more lives than any other human in history i'm really late to this but in my ecology class we learned about how there's a snake problem in guam particularly brown tree snakes the solution dropping dead mice laced with tylenol attached to tiny streamer cardboard parachutes tylenol is poisonous to the snakes and the streamers attract their attention it worked the snakes ate the mice and it mitigated the snake problem that was affecting the native bird species i was tested on this in my final exam i was in college with a real awful set of hand-me-down kitchen utensils i had my heart set on making almond crusted fish food in a one night but had no feasible way of crushing the almonds with the ice knives in my drawer so i put them in a plastic bag and wrapped them in a dish towel and ran them over with my suv a few times in the parking lot voila the fish came out great i used to work for dsw's i t department doing a phone upgrade replacement for all their stores 1000 plus phones all the phones in the stores fit in this little drawer underneath the cash registers for the cashiers to answer when you call the store during the first install after they have already bought all the phones we realize that the phones don't fit into these little drawers there is also nowhere else to put them for cashiers to use the project manger almost hit a brick after a week of thinking about it my team had a solution door stops we bought a pallet of door stops from one of two companies that we could find that sell door stops in bulk in the us we glued them to the back of the phones to angle them enough to fit in the little drawers for the cashiers remember that the next time you are in a dsw checking out edit to clarify these phones were too tall for the drawers under the cash registers and did not have adjustable backs the door stops set them at such an angle that the height of the phone was lower than the height of the drawer opening but also left enough space for the cables on the back of the phone crappy miz paint example [Music] you

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Id: ao0r3fCffOs

Length: 27min 53sec (1673 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2021