My late husband, Michael Stepanich, was a mechanical engineer with General Motors from the day he left the Air Force until the day he retired. He always admonished his job-hopping son, “I’ve had only two employers in my life––the U. S. Air Force and General Motors.” Of course, that was back in the day when employers valued loyal employees.

From the day we were married, Michael always told me I should have been an engineer. First, I’m pathologically curious as to how things are put together, how they work, and how I can make them work when they break down. I can usually repair things around the house, but I don’t always use a “traditional” method to fix them. (See my previous blog, “How to open a P. O. box in Peoria.”)

Recently, the need arose for my engineering skills, or at least my skill at making do with what’s at hand. I have a printer (I’ve excluded the brand name to protect the guilty) that has an unusual method of expelling a page after it’s been printed. The paper wends its way past the ink jets and then is propelled into the outgoing tray. I say “propelled” but I should probably say “jet-propelled.” It whooshes out of the printer and sails across the room unless I put my hand in front of the tray to catch the printed page.

There is a built-in gadget that works fairly well at catching the paper. It’s a small, two-inch wide extension that can be pulled out an additional three inches. There is a very small, attached “lip” that flips up to stop the paper from sailing across the floor. That “lip” is held on to the extension by two extremely tiny plastic rods. And yes, one of those tiny plastic rods broke recently, and the “lip” would no longer flip up.

My first thought was to super glue the little rod back in place. I searched up and down the house to find a bottle of that type of glue. You know the kind I mean––the one that doctors now use to glue your incision closed after surgery, or the type your manicurist uses to glue a fingernail in place. Eureka! I finally found a small bottle of super glue. Did you know that when that stuff is not used for a while, it solidifies into a bottle of concrete? So, scratch the idea of super glue.

Next, I decided to rely on an old standby––Elmer’s. That stuff usually holds anything. The only drawback is the time it takes for it to dry. And I was dealing with gluing the end of a rod that was about a half-inch long and a centimeter in diameter to its host, about the same size. I liberally applied the Elmer’s, and held the tiny rod in place for what I considered to be sufficient time for the glue to dry. Finally, holding my breath in anticipation, I let go of the rod, expecting it to stay in place. Of course, it didn’t. It did, however, stick to my finger.

In frustration and anger, I affixed the flip-up lip to the printer’s paper tray with what I had at hand. I taped it in place with every handyman’s standby product––duct tape. I wrapped the tape several times around the tiny rod and onto the extension. Looking like the injured passenger in a head-on collision, the little flip-up lip now did its job effectively. Paper no longer sailed across the room after being printed.

Of course, now the paper occasionally sticks to the tape and has to be carefully peeled off the tray.