This might be your shower handle. It’s a lot of people’s shower handle, at least in the USA. Do you remember the first time you encountered one of these? I do. I had no idea what I was doing. It turned on full blast. I was intimidated. I think I had to ask for help. What’s wrong with this thing?

The problem is that there are two controls for water volume, and only one makes sense. When you turn the big handle on, you get to vary the volume of scalding hot water. When you adjust the lever at the bottom, you choose bath or shower and the volume of either. I’ll wager that most people don’t know about the volume function (even though it says “LO” and “HI”) because they’re used to the standard bath/shower as a binary switch (pull up for shower, leave down for bath).

My solution would be to make “OFF” the middle position between bath and shower, and to make the temp knob control only temperature. An added bonus: The temp knob now has memory between uses.

Why didn’t they design it this way? My best guess is that it was somehow more difficult, mechanically; more expensive to produce. But perhaps they mangled this thing on purpose. What might they have been thinking?