Yankee Screwdriver stories

• (me) A former co-worker of mine loved to joke with me about my use of "obsolete" tools, until one day when he asked me to help him rack a server. I grabbed my favorite Yankee and went off to help him. He started by making is usual harassment-in-jest, and then we started to screw the machine in. He suddenly got very observant of how fast and effortlessly I was driving the screws in. Then one of us (probably him, for if it was me, he'd have gone back to harassing me, I suspect) dropped a screw, and it fell between two servers in the rack, two machines that were mounted very closely to each other ("One Rack Unit", for those who care). Ron and I are both fairly big guys with fairly strong hands...and neither of us were going to easily just reach between these two servers and fish out the screw. "No problem", I said, as the Yankee screwdriver zipped open, and I used its length and oddly shaped head to fish the missing screw out from between the servers. "Ok, you convinced me, I want one of those!".

• I have often made comment how every Yankee screwdriver came with several bits, but most have either one or none by the time I get them. Well, at one estate sale recently, I hit the "bit jackpot" -- a whole pile of Yankee bits, and not a single screwdriver!

Tell me your Yankee Screwdriver stories, and let me know if I can add them to this page, and how to attribute them to you. (In general, you probably don't want me to post your e-mail address unless you are already something of an often spammed Internet celebrity.)

Write me at (nick at holland-consulting.net).

since 11/9/2007
holy cow. Just realized I never put a counter on this page when I first put it on-line, so I stuck a counter on it. 24 hours later, it had racked up 20 hits, much to my surprise. So, I went back and looked at the logs, and saw 10,362 hits...and that was only a year's worth of logs. The temptation to alter the counter is there, but it seems cheating somehow.

$Id: stories.html,v 1.1 2009/04/02 21:18:24 nick Exp $