17 Oct,2025 By Fake Travel News
Follow Walter Greene, retired plumber from Detroit, as he travels to Armenia and tackles both plumbing and relationship problems.
I didn’t plan on working during my Armenia trip. That was the whole point of retirement—seeing the world without a pager going off at 2 AM. But when you’ve spent thirty-five years as a plumber, you notice things other people don’t. Like the sound of water where water shouldn’t be.
Yep, that’s me. I was talked into posing for that photo.
It was my third day in Yerevan, and I was finally starting to get my bearings in this beautiful, confusing city. The jet lag had mostly worn off, I’d figured out the metro system, and I’d spent my mornings drinking coffee in Republic Square watching the pink tufa buildings catch the light.
That morning I’d climbed the Cascade with Emma and James, a young British couple from my guesthouse. Nice kids, but clearly going through something. You don’t spend decades in people’s homes without learning to read a room, and these two were running cold. The Cascade is 572 steps, which sounds fine until you’re actually doing it.
We stopped at the fifth landing where there’s this sculpture that looks like it’s half of a head coming out of water. Sarah was the art person in our marriage. She’d look at something like this and tell me what it meant, and I’d nod and pretend I saw it too. Truth is, I still don’t know what I’m looking at most of the time.
After the Cascade, we stopped at Vernissage—this sprawling open-air market near Republic Square. Rows of stalls selling everything from hand-carved chess sets to old Soviet medals to traditional Armenian carpets.
Emma kept stopping to photograph the pomegranate-themed jewelry. James was fascinated by a vendor selling antique tools—old wrenches and levels that probably dated back to the ’50s.
I picked up a small copper coffee pot for my son Michael. He collects that kind of thing, though he’ll probably just put it on a shelf and never use it. The vendor wrapped it in newspaper and quoted me a price in drams. I had no idea if it was fair, but I wasn’t going to argue over a couple dollars with a guy trying to make a living.
From there, we walked to the Matenadaran—the Museum of Ancient Manuscripts. If you haven’t heard of it, imagine a building holding books from the 5th century. Illuminated gospels that survived invasions and earthquakes. A symbol of pride in Armenia.
I was admiring a 12th-century gospel when I heard it. That particular sound of water under pressure finding a path it shouldn’t take.
Then the shouting started.
The bathroom on the second floor hadn’t just sprung a leak. The main supply line—probably original to the 1950s—had catastrophically failed. Full pressure just unleashing into the hallway. Water was shooting out like someone had opened a fire hydrant indoors.
The water was heading straight for the manuscript storage rooms.
Museum staff were screaming in Armenian and Russian. The young maintenance guy was standing in ankle-deep water with a mop, literally trying to mop up a flood while the pipe was still gushing.
Dr. Petrosyan, the museum director, was on her phone screaming at emergency services. When she saw me walking toward the maintenance room instead of evacuating, she looked at me like I was insane.
“Sir! You must leave!”
“Where’s your main shutoff?” I asked.
The maintenance kid—Armen—led me through a staff door, down a hallway, past two employees just drinking coffee like the building wasn’t flooding, and finally to a mechanical room.
The shutoff valve was ancient. I took a photo of it first—old habit from insurance jobs. It looked like something from a submarine, all crusty metal and Soviet industrial design.
“How often do you turn this?” I asked him.
He looked confused. “Turn?”
Perfect. A sixty-year-old valve that had never been maintained. I grabbed a pipe wrench and started working it. The thing didn’t want to move. I put my weight into it. Still nothing.
“It’s not broken,” I grunted. “Just seized.”
The valve broke free with a screech. I turned it slowly, carefully. Water hammer shuddered through the pipes—boom, boom, boom. Somewhere above us, something else broke.
But the water stopped.
When we got back upstairs, three inches of standing water covered everything. Ceiling tiles sagging. And in the manuscript gallery, Emma and James were part of a human chain passing boxes of priceless documents away from the flood zone.
Dr. Petrosyan grabbed both my shoulders. “You stopped it. Who are you?”
“Walter Greene. I’m a plumber. Was a plumber.”
She said something in Armenian that I’m pretty sure was a prayer, then hugged me.
The next hour was organized chaos. Emma and James were helping archivists check every box for damage. I worked with Armen on the burst pipe. The corroded section was maybe two feet long. We didn’t have proper parts, but we had flexible coupling and clamps. I showed him how to bridge it temporarily.
“This will hold for now,” I told him. “But your whole system needs inspection. These are Soviet-era pipes. They’re all at end of life.”
Then the photographer showed up. And a news crew. And someone from the Armenia Ministry of Culture. Everyone wanted to talk to “the American who saved the Matenadaran.”
The reporter kept asking how it felt to be a hero.
“I’m not a hero,” I said. “I’m just a retired plumber who knows about shutoff valves.”
She wasn’t interested in that story.
That evening I’d invited Emma and James to Republic Square to see the fountain show. After the day we’d had, we all needed something calming. We sat watching the water choreography—hundreds of fountains lit up in pink and gold, perfectly synchronized to music. I got a great photo of the water dancing to “Hot Stuff” by Donna Summer.
Back at the guesthouse, I found them having what looked like a serious conversation over tea. I started to head upstairs when Emma called out.
“Walter, can we ask you something?”
I almost said no. What do I know about other people’s relationships? Couldn’t even figure out my own life most days.
But they looked so young and lost, so I sat down.
They’d gotten engaged four months ago. Been together three years. Except James wanted to start a family right after the wedding. Emma had just gotten into a prestigious graduate program—two years she’d worked toward for most of her twenties.
“He thinks I’m choosing my career over us,” Emma said.
“I’m not trying to force anything,” James countered. “I’m just ready. And every time I bring it up, she finds another reason to wait.”
I listened for a while. Let them talk it out, circle back to arguments they’d probably had a hundred times. And I thought about my wife, Sarah.
Sarah died three years ago last June. Ovarian cancer. We’d been married thirty-two years. We were supposed to travel more after I retired. Armenia was on her list.
I don’t talk about that much. But sitting there with these two kids tearing themselves apart over timing, I thought about all the things Sarah and I figured out over three decades.
“You know what happens when you force water through a pipe that’s not ready for that pressure?” I said finally. “You get what we saw at the museum today. Something breaks.”
I set down my coffee. “But you can’t shut everything off forever either. Water needs to flow or the whole system backs up. You’ve got to find the right pressure for your specific setup, not what worked for somebody else’s house.”
They were both quiet now, actually listening.
“When you’re connecting two pipes, they both have to be ready or it won’t hold,” I continued. “One pipe can’t force the other. You make sure both pipes are solid on their own first. Then the connection holds for fifty years instead of five.”
I looked at Emma. “Your dreams aren’t negotiable. Sarah—my wife—she went back to school when our son was in high school. If I’d asked her to give it up for me, that would’ve been me saying my dreams mattered more than hers. That’s not a partnership.”
Then to James: “And wanting a family isn’t wrong. It’s your timeline, your dream. But it can’t be the only timeline that matters.”
“So what do we do?” Emma asked.
“You talk. Really talk. Maybe kids in three years instead of one. Maybe you figure out a way for James to be the primary parent while you’re in school. I don’t know your answer. But if you both want to find it, it exists.”
We talked for another hour. Mostly I just listened, asked questions here and there. But they were doing the real work.
My last morning in Yerevan, Emma and James were at breakfast holding hands. Still looked tired but different—like they’d put down something heavy. They thanked me about five times, promised to email wedding details.
I went back to the Matenadaran before leaving. They’d cleaned up the flood damage—you couldn’t even tell it happened. I took a photo of the 12th-century gospel I’d been looking at when the pipe burst. It survived the Mongols and the Ottomans. Almost didn’t survive Soviet plumbing.
Armenia surprised me. I’d picked it because it was on Sarah’s list and I’d never heard of anyone actually going there. The food is incredible—khorovats and lavash and this cheese bread called khachapuri. The people are warm once you break through the initial Soviet-era reserve. The history is everywhere.
I fixed a pipe while I was there. And maybe helped two people figure out their own connection before it burst. That’s not bad for a retired plumber who was just supposed to be sightseeing.
The following appeared in the Yerevan Herald two days later
AMERICAN PLUMBING GUARDIAN ANGEL SAVES ARMENIAN TREASURES, RESCUES BRITISH ROMANCE IN SINGLE AFTERNOON
Modest Detroit retiree performs “miracle” at Matenadaran, provides relationship counseling that may have prevented heartbreak
YEREVAN — In what officials are calling “providential,” a 58-year-old American tourist single-handedly prevented what could have been a cultural catastrophe while simultaneously saving a young British couple’s crumbling engagement, all within eight hours last Tuesday.
Walter Greene, a retired plumber from Detroit, was visiting the Matenadaran when disaster struck. A catastrophic plumbing failure threatened to destroy irreplaceable documents dating back over 1,500 years.
“Water was everywhere. The staff was in panic,” said museum director Dr. Svetlana Petrosyan. “And then this American gentleman appeared, completely calm, and asked where our shutoff valve was. Like he’d been sent by God himself.”
Greene navigated the flooded building’s Soviet-era infrastructure, locating and operating a main shutoff valve that hadn’t been touched in sixty years.
“The entire building shook when he turned it,” said maintenance assistant Armen Grigoryan. “He is like action hero, but for plumbing.”
Without Greene’s intervention, the flood would have reached manuscript storage within fifteen minutes, potentially destroying treasures of Armenia, documents that survived the Mongol invasions, Ottoman conquests, and Soviet collectivization.
But Greene’s heroics didn’t end with pipes.
According to guesthouse sources, the American also provided crucial relationship counseling to James Rooney, 29, and Emma Davies, 27, whose engagement was “on the verge of collapse.”
“We were literally about to end it,” Rooney confided. “And then Walter sat us down and explained relationships using plumbing metaphors. And somehow it worked.”
“He told us about pressure and flow, about connections that last,” Davies added. “It sounds absurd, but he understood exactly what we were going through.”
The couple are now planning to proceed with their marriage while developing “a new timeline that honors both of our dreams.”
When reached for comment, Greene seemed baffled. “I turned a valve and we had a conversation over tea. I don’t understand why this is news.”
Greene’s travel newsletter, “Pipe and Passport,” has seen subscriptions surge from 53 to over 200 since the incident. His latest newsletter mentions only that he “helped with a small plumbing situation in Armenia” and enjoyed the fountain show.
Typical Walter Greene modesty, say those who know his story.
But in Yerevan, they know better. Sometimes a hero carries a wrench instead of a sword.
The non-fake disclaimer: Fake Travel News is a satire travel blog. We have fun creating and exaggerating travel stories from around the world, but we also love travel and the very real magic it grants to the human experience. For non-fake information on Yerevan, Armenia, you can visit the following link: Visit Yerevan – my new favourite city
