Duct Tape, or Failing at the Small Things

This is the reality of living your life in another language, no matter how fluent you become:

At some point, you find yourself standing in a hardware store and realizing that, while you can successfully communicate the concept "I need to fix my floorboards down more firmly because they squeak when walked on, but the nails that hold them in place are already so deeply sunk into the wood that a hammer can't reach them, so I need some kind of small, thin metal piece I can put on top of a nail to then hammer on that instead of on the nail directly" and yet at the same time you don't know the word for "duct tape."

And you stand there and ask yourself, Do I really want to submit myself to the humiliation of playing the describing-and-guessing game for something as basic as duct tape? Or am I going to slink out of here, consult a dictionary, and come back another day?


(To be fair, part of the reason I don't know the word for duct tape is that Germans never seem to USE duct tape. And for those desperate to know how the story ends: I did a second, more thorough pass through the store and eventually found the heavy duty tape on a shelf near the back, thus saving myself both the humiliation of asking and the extra trip to the store!)