Having friends with technical prowess is a powerful network to keep in your back pocket. You never know in what emergency situations that they might come in handy…

How would you handle an insane tech support ask that you could only fix over the phone? One guy recently shared a crazy example of this with Reddit. Here’s what happened,

MacGyver support line, how can I help you?

My friend does art installations for small regional towns.

They’ll go in and make artwork about the town that’s then projected into a local landmark or grain silo.

A niche art, but a cool one.

He rings me one day in a bit of a pickle to see if I can help.

He needs to run a device on 5v.

He only has 12v coming out of I’ve of the devices and 240v mains power.

Well, that certainly IS a pickle.

It’s a regional town late in the afternoon and tonight is the opening show.

All the shops are shut and he doesn’t have a charger.

He has USB cables, but nothing he can plug them into.

Not a ton of options left at that point.

He asks me if there’s a way to safely drop 12v to 5v to run the equipment.

I start thinking about resistor bridges, diodes to drop the voltage and where he might salvage these things from.

I’m going all Apollo 13 in my head.

What a great spin on that type of problem.

Then I ask him if he has a USB charger in his car.

He does!

So I tell him to strip a couple of wires, run 12v from them into the charger.

This is already a brilliant, quick solve.

He dismantles the charger and twists the wires to the contacts covering then with electrical tape.

He turns it on and we now have 5v coming out the charger.

The show is saved and opening night goes ahead.

And he did it all for free!

He said that he eventually got the right bits and did the job properly, but he was very tempted to leave it sure to how funny a hack it was.

MacGyver would have been very proud that day.

This guy certainly possesses a supreme level of technical know-how. Let’s see what the Reddit community had to say about this one.

Some commenters could weirdly enough relate.

And the story certainly reached its target audience.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a barn owner who wants to evict a tenant who promised to build stalls but never did.

Though there was sarcasm abound.

And all shared in some good-natured humor.

If ain’t broke…break it then fix it again!