Plumbing puzzlement

Have you ever used a motel tub-shower and puzzled over how to get the water to come out of the shower head? Plumbing fixtures vary widely in how "user-friendly" they are in this regard. The one in the Super 8 in Wayne, NE was particularly perverse, I felt. Here it is:

Puzzling shower fixture

So - you turned on the water by pulling up the large lever on the right. That was ok. The water came out of the faucet below. Ok. Ah ... to adjust the temperature, you had to turn the dial in the center of the handle - turn counter-clockwise and it got hotter. That wasn't super-obvious, but not too bad. Ok. Now, what did you do to get the water to transfer from the faucet to the shower head? Hmmm. Not obvious,  Well, it turns out you had to grasp a ring under the faucet, and pull it down. You couldn't really see the ring when you were standing there (you can see it better in the photo because I stooped down to take the picture). You had to feel for it. And you had to know to feel for it. It took a while to figure that out. I did finally remember a previous fixture like this I had encountered years ago. When I told Ellen about it, she said she would probably have just given up on the idea of a shower (she had opted not to take a shower on this particular morning). I wonder how many people have used this tub and have given up on taking a shower? And why would a designer make a fixture like this when there are so many better ways to do it?

This tub had an another glitch - a dangerous one. When I took hold of the grab-bar on the tub, it came out of its socket in my hand. There was absolutely nothing that indicated that it was loose. If I had been unbalanced when I grabbed it, I would have fallen out of the shower! Who knows what injuries would have resulted? I called the attention of the front desk to this problem and left the rod sitting in the sink. Here is a picture of it showing one end out of the socket:

Loose grab-bar

And here is the motel:

Super 8, Wayne, NE. Get your act together, Super 8!