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See an insanely complex gizmo zip a zipper the (really) hard way

You may never want to zip up your zipper like a commoner again, after seeing how this crazy Rube Goldberg machine built by students does it. Genius.

Rusty Blazenhoff
Rusty Blazenhoff has been deeply involved in cyberculture for more than 20 years, and immersed in pop culture since getting her first copy of Dynamite magazine. She loves kitsch, quirky artifacts of Americana, and enjoying island life in Alameda, Calif., with her daughter. She makes a mean Fluffernutter.
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Rusty Blazenhoff

Zip a zipper
The winning team and their machine with Jimmy Kimmel Video screenshot by Rusty Blazenhoff/CNET

Each year since the early '80s, contests have challenged student teams to build a Rube Goldberg machine, an over-engineered contraption created to perform a simple task in the complicated hilarious way possible. The task for all of this year's entries in the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest? Zip a zipper.

Describing the machines as an "intentionally delightful waste of time," TV host Jimmy Kimmel recently invited the first-place winners of the contest's 2014 College Nationals, a student group from Purdue University, to show off their design on "Jimmy Kimmel Live." It's called "A Simple Way to get Ready for Work" and you'll have to see it in action to believe it.

Watch this video as Kimmel's sidekick Guillermo steps inside the machine and gets his zipper zipped in a wonderfully absurd way. And congrats to Adam, David, Becca, Andrew, and Jordan, the awesome team behind this clever apparatus!