Attending an international conference on telecommunication as a speaker, I got a bagpack as a souvenir. Everything was okay but its zippers. They were faulty as one of them shown in `01 - The Faulty Zipper.jpg'. I really should have checked its zippers when I received the bag. Anyway, with some patience I always succeeded in closing the zippers. But, they were really annoying just like when you use proprietary software. You just cannot modify them to make your life easier, and they are demanding more and more control to be taken away from you (e.g., Windows Defender and Genuine Advantage). After six months, a hacker came telling me how I should fix those faulty zippers.

It was my mom. First, return the slider to its original position and get the tool as shown in `02 - The Tool.jpg'. Next, crimp both the left and right butts of the slider as shown in `03 - Fixing The Left Butt.jpg' and `04 - Fixing The Right Butt.jpg' before you can get it right as shown in `05 - It is Fixed.jpg'. Don't crimp both of them with all your might at one time. Instead crimp both of them with some power and try to zip the zipper. If it is still faulty, crimp both of them again a bit harder and try again. If you crimp them too hard, you will require more power to zip the zipper. In case you crimp both of them too hard, just insert the points of the tool in a closed position into the slider and open the points so that the slider's grip on the zipper can be loosen.

When I asked my mom from where she learned the fix, she said that she observed how a zipper worked and fiddled with it a bit before coming up with the fix. Wonderful! After that, out of curiosity I googled for "faulty zipper" that led me to google for "fix faulty zipper" that returned this very consise page: http://www.ehow.com/how_2099903_repair-zippers.html. Next, based on some results there, I googled for "fix zipper separate" that returned this good page: http://tailoring.suite101.com/article.cfm/zipper_repair. Well, I should have googled for those keywords when I received the bag and spotted the problem. But, I think I was born in a generation where search engine is not included in one of your problem-solving tools. Surely I have to include search engine in my problem-solving tools now.