I impressed my daughter today! The CD-ROM drive in her computer was stuck halfway and wouldn’t move anymore.
I opened up the case, took out the drive, removed the casing and peeked into the interior with a completely fake ‘I know what I’m doing’ look on my face. I saw a piece of plastic that was twisted, I removed it (silently praying), I put everything back together (actually I did that twice, I forgot some parts the first time) and voila: it worked! Elementary, my dear Watson. And I probably made the same impression on Clemence as my father used to make on me: my dad can fix anything!
Actually, for some reason this technique works quite often: you reverse-engineer a gizmo, optionally you actually fix something, you put everything back together and it works. The trick is then to put an expensive label on it: “Presumably a bad contact”, “Undoubtedly a rogue device driver”. In this case: an acute mechanical encumbrance.