In one of the cubicles in the mens’ here at work, the flush buttons on the cistern have always been a problem. Sometimes you can’t press them down at all, sometimes they’re hard but possible, sometimes they work fine.
So a few days ago, someone sharper than I removed the porcelain lid to the cistern and laid it on the ground next to the loo. Bingo, no more problem! And no busybody has replaced the cistern lid or reported that there’s any problem with the situation to the facilities people. Brilliant.
I’m now going in to label which button is for a full flush and which is for half, then the system will be better than it was new! What thing or system have you come across that worked better when broken or incomplete than when new?
A few weeks ago I bought an identical pair of leather (motorcycle) boots to the ones I already have that are 2 or 3 years old and was surprised by how uncomfortable the are. My old ones are the most comfortable shoes I own. The leather on the old ones are as pliable as a pair of Converse All Stars, on the new ones it’s like hard plastic. I had to convince myself the old ones started out like that as well and took about a month before they were really comfortable.
OK, time to reboot this broken thread. The intent is not to list things that are broken by intent (eggs, hymens, horses). As per the OP, it’s supposed to cover things that were not designed to be broken intentionally, but when it happened accidentally they unexpectedly turned out better than before.
I had a Hillman Imp in the 1970s that had a problem with one of the front wheels, which make it hard to steer and brake properly (I suspect a bearing or joint). Through youthful exuberance I spun the thing and it slammed sidewayys into the kerb; this seemed to free up the problem with the front wheel! From that day on it worked better than before, at least until I rallyed the thing into the ground and blew the head gasket.
I think this qualifies, although it will be on the edge.
I have a paperback Beatles chord book. It contains every song they wrote. It’s very thick because it’s a couple hundred pages. When playing guitar or piano, the pages must be weighted because the book will NOT stay open. Eventually, from bending the pages and binding backwards enough, the spine breaks and it stays open much better.
When I wore out my first copy, I took a new copy to a copy store and had them cut the binding off, hard laminate the covers, and drill two sets of holes so that I could put binder rings through to hold the entire thing together.
Technically broken, and works PERFECTLY! And my binder system is much better than the plastic combs a lot of music books come with because there is no comb to come undone and the pages don’t rip at the holes.
Semi-cheat, but the old-style low-flow showerheads often installed in apartments (hence the tenants often had no say). These usually had a small restrictor plate that could be removed, and thus full shower flow could be restored.
Of course, the intent of this restriction in the first place was to make the shower work ‘worse’ from the tenant’s perspective (less water flow per time - NOT a bonus for a shower user), but not the landlord’s (savings in water usage), and so ‘breaking’ the shower head by definition improves it (allows for a greater water flow) for the tenant only.