The Next MacGyvers
Like most of my stories, if not all of them, I must begin with some background information for this story. First of all, spring break is an exciting time of the school year that almost everybody looks forward to. I however, do not enjoy it too much. First of all, you leave all of your friends at college to be with your friends from home who you haven’t seen for a really long time, and therefore, you’re not as close. Secondly, there’s all the catching up that you have to do. I just wanna skip all that and just hang out, but by the time you’ve all been caught up on everything, and things are relatively back to normal, it’s time to go back to school. Finally, it just totally messes up the system you’ve established for yourself, and therefore you’re left with large periods of time when you’re just sitting around trying to think of something, anything, to do, but alas, any and all ideas manage to elude you. Therefore, I thought that this spring break would be absolutely awful. However! I am glad to say that this is certainly not the case. I get home and after no more than an hour, I’m already with my best friend (or at least one of them... and when I say them, I am referring to a very small group of people... like maybe two... anyways..). So yes, I already get to visit my best friend Boris, and it’s great! We do catch up on things, but it’s not boring, and it’s just like it used to be. Still playing ping-pong (which he still manages to destroy me in when he wants to), fooseball (which he’s gotten pretty dang good at, and now embarrasses me in), and just hanging out. It was a TON of a lot of fun, and it made me doubt my ill feelings toward spring break. This has absolutely nothing to do with the next MacGyvers, and the only reason I include this is because Boris is so cool, and I had so much fun, that I just had to let people know. So now for the story....

Later that night, I talk to Steven. Now it is important to know that Steven and I have a tradition going for us. Whenever I’m in town, we try to make plans to meet at some point at Grinders for lunch. We always get the same thing, and it’s just really cool to hang out. So we make plans to meet the next day, Saturday March 6, 2004 around 1:00pm. So 12:45 roles around and my mom yells up and wakes me up, and about 15 minutes later, I’m meeting Steven at Grinders. Well, much to our surprise, it was a lot more crowded that normal, so we decided to get it to go and eat it back at my house. So we go back, eat it, and we still wanna hang out, but we can’t quite decide on what to do, due to a lack of transportation and nice weather outside. So, while we’re trying to figure out what to do, I stumble across a yo-yo my mom gave me the night before. I forget what it was from, but I’m guess it was something for our pets. I think it was either attached to the outside of the kitty litter, or the fish food. Why? I have absolutely no idea, so there’s a good chance I’m just making it up, but that doesn’t matter. The thing that matter is that I found the yo-yo. So I start playing with the yo-yo. And I don’t mean to brag here, but I think I was ridiculously good. I was able to fling it down hard enough to get it to stay down and just spin a lot. Now, “professional” yo-yoists... or are they yo-yoers... maybe yo-yorians... Ok, so I have absolutely no idea, but if you have any thoughts about it, be sure to let me know. Anyways, these professionals call this impressive and incredibly rare performance, “The Sleeper.” After some research, I have discovered that I have just committed a common error that writers make when covering “yo-yoing” (This term happens to be the proper term for “the action of playing with a yo-yo”). So the highly technical term for someone who yo-yos is actually a player. However, with such complicated yo-yo jargon, who could be expected to remember, or even understand such a complicated title for the yo-yoer. Before I return to my story, it is important that I should note that this information was taken from Donald Duncan Jr.’s page, which can be found at http://www.yoyoing.com/duncan/writer.html. Now, back to the story.

Whenever I executed the sleeper trick, I observed that the yo-yo would light up when it was ‘asleep’. Well, after a little more yo-yoing, I put it down and started fiddling around with it, and noticed that the inside of the yo-yo, which was visible thanks to a clear case, was quite unique. Upon inspection of the yo-yo, I accidently turned it and began to unscrew it, and I kept unspinning it until it came apart into to separate pieces. Well, Steven and I quickly got bored of that, so I went to put it back together, but, uh... well, lets say that durability of the yo-yo wasn’t as great as I was hoping. So Steven and I have a broken yo-yo, and we get a brilliant idea. This just goes to show that some of the greatest discoveries are found by pure chance and luck. So we decide to try to open the yo-yo and inspect the inside. Despite the seemingly simple task, we were confronted with several obstacles. First of all, the screws holding it together were tiny, and we didn’t have a screw driver small enough. First we tried just popping the case of each side apart by putting in a pin and using it as a lever. However, the pin was too narrow, and it would’ve broken if we had even gotten it in far enough to act as a lever. So decided to give up on that attempt, and I switched to the primitive and effective method, which I like to call, “just smash it as hard as you can.” Well, I dried a screw driver, which unfortunately didn’t work, except at possibly making a few tiny dents on one side. Finally, I realized what I had to do. I had to find something small enough to unscrew the screws holding the casing together. The screwdriver we did have was so small that it didn’t even come close to fitting in the holes. So I quickly abandoned that idea and switched to a more successful plan. I went into the kitchen, and put our utensils to good use. I first grabbed a small knife. This fit into the screws, but wasn’t strong enough to turn the screws without bending. I figured it was a good idea, but it just needed to be modified, so I took the biggest knife we own and tried with that. Well, the knife was so big, that like the screwdriver, it didn’t fit into the hole, so I gave up on knives in general. From there, I went to the large, two-pronged fork. This worked like a charm. I got one screw out, and then the other. My MacGyver skills were put to use, and out of an ordinary yo-yo and a two-pronged fork, I made a two-pronged fork, and a bunch of little pieces that could be assembled to make a yo-yo.

At this point, we were both very anxious to find out how the yo-yo lit up. I figured that it probably had something to do with the centrifugal force pushing something away from the center of the yo-yo. Therefore, when the yo-yo spins quickly, such as when putting the yo-yo “to sleep,” the force would be so great, that somehow the light would be able to light it up. Well, when Steven and I looked at it, we noted a thin, flexible metal strip, that could easily bend and complete a circuit connecting a light and two small batteries. To test this out, we decided to touch the metal strip to a metal wire, thus completing the circuit, and lighting the light. We saw our goal, and Steven went to work to make it happen. Well, fearing for any electrical current that might shock somebody, we decided we needed an insulator bring the metal strip to touch the wire, so we took a pencil and used that. That didn’t work, so we took the screw driver and used that. Nothing. Since Steven was worried that the rust on the screwdriver might be affecting our tests, we took a metal thing that was holding together the two parts of the yo-yo, tied it to the end of the screwdriver using the yo-yo string, and used that. That didn’t work. We then took a pair of non-rusty scissors and tried them. Again, nothing. At this point, we were getting pretty pissed off, so Steven simply touch the two pieces of metal together. Nothing. Somehow, by taking off the case, the circuit had gotten messed up. We were both extremely depressed, with our heads hung low with defeat. Out of anger, Steven took the scissors and began cutting the glue that was holding the light bulb in place. Well, before I knew it, he was crying out in excitement that it was working!!! I don’t know how he did it, but he somehow fixed the broken yo-yo. Shortly after, we discovered that the current was so small that there was absolutely no danger in touching it to complete the circuit. So, using his MacGyver skills, Steven was able to take a circuit, cut it a little with some scissors, and then most a piece of metal to complete a premade circuit. With our teamwork, we were able to get the red light of a yo-yo to light up, and if you ever struggle so much with something that seems so simple, then you will understand the joy we had when we finally got it to work. I think it’s safe to say that that was the happiest moments of both of our lives. Ok, well maybe not the happiest, or even close to it, but it was still pretty sweet.