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Fast food in Armenia is a lavash wrap with gyro meat, cucumbers, other stuff and french fries (in the wrap, not on the side).
The fast food was great, the shower in my room... not so much. It was a hand-held shower with no holder to keep it up.
I'm not willing to play statue of liberty with one hand raised to hold the shower over my head while I scrub with the other.
A few minutes and a couple plastic grocery store bags later, the shower head wasn't exactly where I wanted it, but it was good enough to crouch under and take a civilized shower.
The shower in the house Carol designed was much nicer, but after barely 16 years of use, a little plastic part broke, and the shower head fell to the shower floor.
A configuration strongly reminiscent of the one in Armenia.
With a basement full of tools, boxes of spare parts, and my previous success when armed with nothing but my wits and a plastic grocery bag, I viewed the broken shower with some arrogance and firm intention of showing it just who was boss.
The short answer is that it was.
I replaced the screw that went into the plastic part with a slightly larger screw, but it wouldn't tighten enough to hold. The piece it screws into rotates (so the shower head can be twisted), but you can't screw into something that won't hold still.
On to plan B. A zip-tie and some choice words reworked the broken assembly into a barely acceptable state. Better than the shower in Armenia, but not particularly great.
Usually my kludges are ugly as sin, but work better than the original. This one was just ugly. Maybe if it had been uglier, it would have worked better.
A quick trip to Lowes was informative. I learned that the sort of shower assembly I've got isn't common and doesn't match anything they sell.
After some flailing around on the net, I finally googled for "shower head holder." The return had a thousand and one items designed for the type of shower I don't have, and *one* designed to exactly replace the broken unit.
And, unlike a replacement shower kit (multiple hundreds of dollars!) this was under ten bucks.
It arrived a day later, and took under 5 minutes to install.
It's not as intellectually satisfying as a hand-crafted kludge, but it works just like the original.
Our modern civilization is a mass of inter-dependencies we are seldom aware of. We are utterly dependent on the most inconsequential of items. Take for instance, the hot-glue gun. Without this item, there would be no Amazon boxes, without which civilization would fall.
A hot glue gun is also useful for convincing a chunk of plastic that insists on turning, instead of holding still and letting a screw force its way into it, to behave as desired.
Once I had the new shower holder installed, I took the broken parts into the basement, hot-glued the twisty part to be a no-longer-twisty part, and screwed the pieces together.
The original holder now works just like new. The new one works fine, so I'm keeping the repaired unit on hand for the day when the replacement goes the way of all cheap parts and I need a quick kludge.
It's not even ugly--on the outside. Hot glue always makes a hot mess.