25 Times The Smartest Solution Was Also The Silliest One
Most problems get solved one of two ways: somebody smart figures out the actual fix, or somebody desperate does whatever stops the bleeding in the moment, throwing logic out the window. The second option doesn’t get nearly enough credit, mostly because it sounds ridiculous on paper, but it works just often enough that you can’t really argue with it.
Someone over on r/answers asked what the silliest solution to a real problem looked like, and the responses really show that sometimes overthinking is the actual mistake. These are the best answers from that thread, all somehow both completely absurd and weirdly effective.
1.
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.
2.
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.
3.
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.
4.
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.
5.
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.
6.
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.
7.
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.
8.
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.
9.
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.
10.
The door to a freight elevator at work got stuck once. Latch was open and everything.
I wound up using a forklift to gently start pulling the door upward until it was sliding on its track like normal. Didn’t have that problem again either.
11.
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?”.
12.
A long time ago, most cars used circulating water in radiators to cool the engines. These were semi-open systems that require radiators to be periodically topped up with water.
From time to time, a radiator may develop tiny holes or cracks so that the water leaked out. Obviously this will be bad because the engine will overheat, so the radiator need to be repaired or replaced, which will cost oodles of money.
In Malaysia at that time, some motorists used an extremely silly but kinda workable solution to fix a leaky radiator. They take cow dung (no kidding) and dropped that into the radiator. Apparently, the dung is made out of very fine particles and these will disperse themselves to fill and successfully clog up and stop the leaky bits. A radiator will then be sufficiently “fixed” to get a car moving to where it will need to go. This sounds like a temporarily solution, but it was actually used as a medium to long-term fix. Even mechanics will use this method for small leaks.
I assume that cow dung was more widely available to be easily at hand for use back then.
13.
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.
14.
Painting livestock like zebras to keep bugs from biting them. They do this on horses also.
15.
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.
16.
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.
17.
Turn it off turn it back on again.
18.
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.
19.
I recall reading how NASA spent tons of money developing a pen that could be used in space, whereas the Russians just used a pencil.
20.
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!
21.
I had a vacuum hose fall off my car, making it so it couldn’t change gears. I jammed a short pencil in the hole and drove the car like that for 2 years.
22.
Before power bank, I bought an additional battery for my phone and swapped it in whenever charge was low.
23.
My friend stuck a squeaker chicken to his car to know when to stop. A couple of days later, all my friends with the car had such a modification.
24.
Stick your finger in the hole… First aid for puncture with a big bleed and no packing.
25.
A bridge was hit by a truck on the only hwy into the city with a large commuter population. Day 1 after was a [trainwreck] of trying to route people through a town to get back on after the bridge. My husband sat it in trying to get to the airport for 5 hours before giving up.
Someone on Reddit used MS paint to suggest basically making a makeshift on and off ramp to go around the bridge using the side street right off the side. Someone who knew someone commented they were going to move that idea up the chain. It was implemented within 48’s. I think day 1-2 it was taking people up to 6 hours to get through and once that was implemented it was reduced to only an hour or so longer than normal.