Colour, it can be matter of perception

What colour is this dishwasher? Photo by Roy Colbert.
What colour is this dishwasher? Photo by Roy Colbert.
If I have been asked the question in Trivial Pursuit where the word kitchen comes from once, I have been asked it a thousand times.

I always answer Germany, because it just sounds German.

But the answer is Latin, kitchenius, masculine noun, meaning a haven for cretins.

In Trivial Pursuit also I have been asked the derivation of the word dishwasher, many times, and many times I have come up short, usually costing my team the game.

Dishwasher is a Polish word, Dischwascherischer, meaning the key piece in a kitchen where cretins are seen at their most cretinous.

The Whirlpool dishwasher went down just before Christmas after an erratic life of malfunctions and hissy fits.

There were 19 for Christmas dinner, so a dishwasher that was no more useful than a jandal thong was a particularly Finish Ball to swallow.

But in truth I was keen to see the Whirlpool go, for it had provided the most cretinous point in my life so far, a day early in its career when it stopped going completely and I was forced to ring the fixit man.

He reached under the sink, put the plug back in the wall, and the machine roared into life.

$78.

Boy, he would have had a story to tell his mates about cretins when he got back to work.

I replaced the Whirlpool with a Bosch, renowned German excellence and flawless precision, quiet as an anaesthetised ant, the absolute king in the dishwasher kingdom, unlike Whirlpool, commonly known as the eunuch.

The machine was installed and I stood back to review its Germanic brilliance.

Pretty much every aspect of it was outstanding.

The only lingering doubt I had was that it was green.

Unusual, I thought, green, but then again, 20 years ago, red was unusual in a kitchen.

Perhaps green is the new red, heaven knows the roads are full of green cars now.

The son thought it was more gold than green, though he struggles with colour.

Green and red are the same to him, hence he will never legally work as an electrician or a pilot.

Others came to the house and tossed up various hues, bronze, greeny gold and even yellow.

One woman claimed the dishwasher door was merely reflecting the colours that passed in front, and as my friends are all tremendously multicoloured, this theory certainly held water.

Unlike the Whirlpool.

But as the 14-day Change Of Mind rule ebbed by, a horrible fear gripped my cretinous brain.

Was this a sample model testing out punter reaction to green, a model that had been banished to the back left-hand corner of the Harvey Norman basement after weeks of ridicule, unsaleable, the butt of so much customer derision that it had to be hidden in the bottom of the building?

Had Harvey Norman thrown out a bonus to its whiteware salesmen - whoever can shift the green Bosch dishwasher gets a month for two in Paris?

On the ninth day, I buckled, and shuffled cretinously into Harvey Norman looking for ''Brendon'', the salesman who had sold me the green dishwasher.

He wasn't there.

I didn't ask where he was.

If I had been told he was in Paris I think I would have killed the informant with my bare hands and rammed him headfirst into a front-loading washing machine.

But instead I plugged on indomitably with the new salesman.

I showed him the model I had bought, waving the receipt.

''My eyes are not the best, mate,'' I said.

''What colour is this dishwasher?''

''It's stainless steel,'' he replied, incredulous at the question.

''No, what COLOUR is it?'' I asked again.

He looked me up and down, almost as if I was a cretin.

''Silver,'' he replied.

''Well,'' I said, ''I bought one before Christmas, and it's green.''

His look at me was longer this time.

And it was quite a while before he spoke.

''You have to peel off the plastic protective cover,'' he said.

Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.

Add a Comment