From "Zodiac" by Neal Stephenson (of "Snow  Crash" fameandfortune).
    The main character is trying to figure out how to 'sabotage' an
    illegal mile long toxic waste diffusion pipe emptying into a New
    Jersey marsh, by plugging up the holes somehow:


        Most of my colleagues go on backpacking trips when they have
        to  do some thinking. I go to a good hardware store and head
        for the oiliest, dustiest corners. I strike up conversations
        with the oldest people who work there, we talk about machine
        vs. carriage bolts and whether to use  a  compression  or  a
        flare fitting. If they're really good, they don't hassle me.
        They let me wander around and think. Young  hardware  clerks
        have  a  lot  of  hubris.  They think they can help you find
        anything and they ask a lot of stupid questions in the  pro-
        cess.  Old  hardware  clerks  have learned the hard way that
        nothing in a hardware store ever gets bought for its nominal
        purpose.  You  buy  something  that  was  designed to do one
        thing, and you use it for another.

        So in the first couple of minutes I  had  to  blow  off  two
        zesty  young  clerks.   It's  easy for me now, I just mumble
        about something  very  technical,  using  terms  they  don't
        understand.  Pretending  to know what I mean, they direct me
        off toward another part of the store. Young clerks  like  to
        use  a  zone  coverage, whereas the oldtimers prefer a loose
        man-to-man, so you can wander and think, pick up an  armload
        of  items,  frown,  turn around, put them all back and start
        over again.

        I did a lot of that.  After  half  an  hour,  an  old  clerk
        orbited by, just to be courteous, to establish that I wasn't
        a shoplifter. "Anything I  can  help  you  with?"  he  asked
        understandingly.

        It's a long, long story," I said, and that put him at  ease.
        He  went  back  to  coffee  and inventory and I took another
        swing down the plumbing aisle, visions of theta-holes  danc-
        ing in my head.

        What we had here was your basic hard-soft dilemma. I  needed
        something soft that would form itself to the gentle curve of
        the pipe and make a toxic-waste-tight  seal. But it  had  to
        have  enough backbone that the pressure wouldn't destroy it.
        Two laps around the Best Hardware Store in  Blue  Kills  had
        demonstrated that no single object would do the trick. Now I
        was trying to break it down, one problem at a time.

        First, the soft part. And there it was:  ring  shaped,  four
        inches across, rubber. Attractively blister packed and hang-
        ing there like fruit on a tree.

        "How many of these toilet gaskets  you  have  in  stock?"  I
        shouted.  The young clerks froze in dismay and the old clerk
        took it right in stride.

        "How many toilets you got?" he called.

        "A hundred and ten."

        "Wow!" piped a younger clerk, "Must be some house!"

        "I'm a plumber missionary," I  explained,  wandering  toward
        the  front  of  the  store.  "Going  down to..." almost said
        Nicaragua, but caught myself "Guatemala  next  week.  Figure
        the only way to stop the spread of disease down there is put
        in modern plumbing facilities. So I need a whole shitload of
        those things."

        Of course they didn't believe me, but they didn't need to.

        "Joe, go see how many," said the boss.  Giggling  nervously,
        Joe  headed  for  the  basement.  I turned before they could
        bother me with questions and moved on to Phase II: something
        hard  and  round  that  could  hold the pressure, hold those
        toilet gaskets against the side of the big pipe.  Some  kind
        of disk. God help us if we had to cut a hundred disks out of
        plywood. I could see us up all night  on  the  deck  of  the
        Blowfish, running out of saber-saw blades. Somewhere in this
        great store there had to  be  a  lot  of  hard  round  cheap
        things.

        To summarize: they were having a sale on salad bowl sets  in
        the  housewares department. Cheap plastic. A big bowl, serv-
        ing implements, and half a dozen small bowls nested  inside.
        I  borrowed a small bowl from the display set and carried it
        over to plumbing, where I could hold it against  the  toilet
        gaskets: a perfect match.

        Now I just needed something that would hold the salad  bowls
        with  their rims pressed against the gaskets pressed against
        the pipe. All along I'd  known  that  the  crossbar  running
        across each hole could serve as an anchor.  In the back they
        had yards and yards of threaded steel rod,  which  would  do
        just fine. Cut it into five-inch chunks,  use a vise to bend
        a hook into one end, hook  it  over  the  crossbar,  run  it
        through  a  hole in the center of the bowl and use a wingnut
        to hold the bowl down.  It'd take some work, but that's what
        nitrous oxide was for.

        I bought a hundred and  ten toilet gaskets,   ninteen  salad
        bowl  sets,  fifteen  three-foot-long  threaded quarter-inch
        rods, a hundred and fifty wingnuts (we  were  sure  to  drop
        some),  an  extra  vise,  a chunk of lead pipe (for leverage
        when bending hooks  into  the  rods),  four  hacksaws,  some
        files, some pipe cement, and a couple spare 5/16-inch drills
        for drilling through the bottoms of the bowls. Paid in  cash
        and  persuaded them to deliver it to the public dock at Blue
        Kills Beach at the close of the business day.  Then I walked
        out into the bright Jersey sunlight, a free man. It was well
        past noon and time for a burger.