One of me Pops favorite stories involved a Scotsman from the old neighborhood, I'll call him MacCloyce just to give him a name, who worked in a production facility. And he liked to drink too.
As Dad tells it, the factory where MacCloyce earned his daily bread had trouble with a new conveyor system. It shut down completely one day, and no amount of ingenuity could get it running. Workers were lounging around, and a cadre of management suits and pocket protected engineers assembled to determine what was wrong.
They studied and questioned and ciphered and looked over sections of the conveyor and could not figure out the problem. Meanwhile, MacCloyce arrived on the scene. Drunk.
MacCloyce began to pester the suits and engineers, mostly in garbled dialogue which was just the same quite insistent: he knew how to fix what ailed them. Everyone tried their best to ignore him, yet that only made MacCloyce all the more certain of himself. Finally someone said, "Let Mac talk and then maybe we can get on with things!"
MacCloyce barked, "Gimme a chalk!" When one was produced, MacCloyce formed the group into a large circle, leaving a wide area on the concrete floor of the plant as his canvas for all to see. He began to draw a likeness of the conveyor system, pointing out key areas with arrows as he went along. Soon he was altering parts of his artwork to show how to adjust the system so that it'd work. In ten minutes he stood up and triumphantly tossed the piece of chalk aside.
The engineers began pouring over the diagram, and were soon nodding their heads in agreement. They told the suits, "This will work." MacCloyce just smiled.
"How do you like that?" one of the higher ups remarked, "Our best engineers are stumped, and a drunk Scotsman gets us out of trouble."
Both me Pops and me Grandpa Joe always laughed at that tale.
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