I am the MacGyver

At a loose end this evening (and having no credite left on my home phone and not wanting to give the bastards any more) I wander down to the 24 hour computer suite. On my arrival I discover the power is out but someone is coming to fix it soon. There's this poor guy waiting who obviously has work to do/want to go home, but his Zip disk is stuck in the drive and there's no manual eject hole, and the computers are bolted down. So I watch as he takes a Coke can out of the bin, cuts it into strips and makes two little tubes and wraps them around the pins of the plug, and think he's just fiddling. then he cuts some more strips, takes a cable from another computer and prods them into the cable on the other end ("in tears" I think as I work out what he's up to). He then gets a third cable plugs the 2 mains plugs together, joins the computer ends of the the second and third cables together and plugs it into ("IN TEARS. IN TEARS. IN TEARS." my brain [irrationally] screams, and I gasp transfixed as he plugs the far end into a socket away from the computer desks. Nothing happenned. But wow.