It also might help if you forcibly assigned your Sim a gold robotics talent badge. This can be done with various non-awesome hacks, or from debug mode. Activate "boolProp testingCheatsEnabled true" in the cheat window, then spawn the "Badge Juicer." Don't forget to disable debug mode (by typing "boolProp testingCheatsEnabled false") after you are finished to avoid spontaneous game explosions.

When the same happened to my servo the sim who built her, in possesion of a gold robot talent badge, was able to repair the robot.

If you happen to have OFB, you can use JM's awesome Customer Selector to force a meeting with a vampire. Just purchase some sort of buisness and use the Person State options to reject everyone but vampires.

The object in question can be found here:
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=4568.0

As a reminder, food in a sim's inventory will not go bad, so you can still make full use of the "serve meal" option even if a household only has two to three sims. Just have them eat what they'd like and put the leftovers in one the sim's inventories. This can also be useful for pregnant/sick sims; have them keep several meals in their inventories so they don't have to go through the hassle of preparing food every time they need to eat.