February 7th, 2008
Thinking Outside The Box - Access Collective Genius
My wife had a pretty little turquoise and silver bracelet. After wearing it one day she discovered she couldn’t get it off. It was stuck and the clasp wouldn’t budge. Calling on my vast experience as a fixer of broken things, she asked me to unstick it. I failed. She wore it to bed that night. She didn’t sleep well - the bracelet was just tight enough to be irritating. The next morning she declared it had to come off. We looked at it - we both tried to get the clasp to work - to no avail. It wasn’t so valuable that we should take it to a jeweler. That damned clasp just wouldn’t move. We ended up cutting it off with a bolt cutters. And as soon as we did, the part of the bracelet that we thought was the hinge fell off - and we discovered we had been trying to open the wrong end of the clasp!