Behind the cash register at Smoke Shop No. 2 in downtown San Francisco, Sam Azar swipes a customer’s credit card to ring up a purchase of Turkish cigarettes. The store’s card reader fails to scan the card’s magnetic strip. Azar swipes again, and again.
No luck.
As impatient customers begin to line up, he reaches beneath the counter for a small black plastic grocery bag. He wraps one layer of the plastic around the card and swipes it again. Success. The sale is rung up.
“I don’t know how it works — it just does,” said Azar, who learned the trick years ago from another clerk. Verifone, the company that makes the store’s card reader, will not confirm or deny that the plastic-bag trick works. But it is one of many low-tech fixes for high-tech failures that people without engineering degrees have discovered — often out of desperation — and shared with one another.
A shaky economy is likely to produce many more such tricks.
“In postwar Japan, the economy wasn’t doing so great, so you couldn’t get everyday-use items like household cleaners,” said Lisa Katayama, author of “Urawaza,” a book whose name uses the Japanese term for clever lifestyle tips and tricks. “So people looked for ways to do with what they had.”
Popular urawaza include picking up broken glass from the kitchen floor by wiping it with a slice of bread, and placing house plants on a water-soaked diaper to keep them watered during a vacation trip.
Americans are finding their own tips and tricks for fixing misbehaving gadgets with supplies as simple as paper and adhesive tape. Some, like Azar’s plastic bag, are open to argument as to how they work, or whether they really work at all. But many home remedies for technical problems can be explained with a little science.
Your cell phone…