Most people, when they make a deal with the Devil, would go for the usual things. Fame, riches, women, a winning Formula One team. Not me: I decided to go for something that would really benefit me. Thanks to my Satanic contract, I now possess the power to crimp electrical connectors by hand.
Why? How often does this happen to you: you’re at a news studio when the RG6 connector on the satellite uplink fails. Looks like some corrosion got into the cable from the time the Community Events Cruiser was looking into free pancake breakfasts. Maybe a little bit of maple syrup got slopped on the floor then, and now the cable is toast. You need to make a new one, and lucky for you the back seat is full of raw co-axial cable. The only thing you don’t have is a crimper. Boom - you just saved the day.
Want another reason? Let’s say you want to crimp, oh I don’t know, Weatherpack connectors. They’re pretty common in bad American cars. You could do it with a pair of pliers and a squint, but to really be sure you want the proprietary crimper set. Even if you’re going to China for your crimper, the shitty little piece of stamped-steel garbage that will barely last an entire ECU’s worth of crimping costs fifty to seventy bucks. That’s like, seven pizzas. And every different cable family needs its own expensive crimper - sometimes thousands of dollars. You come out way ahead if you can just squeeze the pin between your thumb and forefinger, squint at it, and bellow “by the infinite power of Beezlebub, I declare this pin crimped!”
In fact, I’ve actually made a profit. Once in awhile I drop by the sketchy mechanic at the end of my street, pinch a couple battery cables together for him, and he lets me walk off with any part I want from a customer car, because they’re going to pay to replace it if he says so anyway. Unethical? Yes, but you’re talking about a guy who made a pact with the Great Defiler.
