I got a
new job in a very casual way - the company owner
mentioned that if I stopped by on
such-and-such a date,
I could work for him.
So I went, and found myself in a conference room with
others as puzzled as me. None of us knew what the company
did or what we'd be working on.
Soon we found out: we had to alter a football so that it
could be thrown by a particular machine. The machine
was breaking each football because it had this flat
metal tab that snapped, like the metal tab in one of those
annoying clicker toys, and the snap! is what both
catapulted and broke the ball.
Our first solution was to wrap the football in a rectangular
metal cage, which of course was too hard, and so we wrapped
that in a thick soft felt, and padded the ends.
This had the problem of getting very heavy when wet, so
we wrapped the whole mess in a diaper.
Voila! Problem solved!