Effin' P

New Zealand is not a chest-beating, flag-waving sort of place. Overt displays of nationalistic pride are, if not frowned upon, then quietly mumbled-about under the breath in that talking-without-your-lips-moving way beloved of Kiwis and championed spectacularly by the current coach of the All Blacks. They, of course, are one of the few exceptions to that rule. Slagging off the All Blacks - unless you're a card-carrying member of the sports media, whose job it is to do so - is tantamount to treason. Along with calling jandals thongs, not knowing the words to Dave Dobbyn's 'Loyal' or being in any way adequate at cricket.

Add one more to the list: disparaging Fisher & Paykel whitegoods. Or 'whiteware', as the locals quaintly call it. F&P are a homegrown Kiwi success story, led by innovative Kiwi design and number-8-wire Kiwi ingenuity to make great Kiwi products for real Kiwi Kiwis, and also foreign types who are not Kiwis, on account of being foreign. So what if they're owned by the Chinese now; most models can still be persuaded to play God Save New Zealand if you hack the service modes. Slagging off F&P product in New Zealand - and even more so in Dunedin, where the ingenious DishDrawer dishwasher was first conceived, designed, engineered and manufactured - is akin to wiping your fetid ringpiece on the silver fern after taking a dump on Sir Ed's grave.

F&P 'whiteware' fucks me off no end.

It wasn't always the case. In my yoof, we had a F&P fridge which lasted some 15 or more years. This was long before F&P was a 'thing' - the turn of the 90s, from memory - but the thing was bristling with clever, underplayed design features. It was an upside-down model, which meant you had a larger usable freezer space, but all the fridgey stuff you actually wanted access to on a regular basis, like the milk in the doors, was at a sensible adult height. It never broke down, it didn't make a lot of noise, and it survived two teenage boys opening it every five minutes to see if a plate of cold sausages had magically appeared in the middle shelf. Sadly, the ability to magic-up cold sausages was one skillset that was beyond it. But it was a good device.

Fast-forward to today, where I have spent half the morning swearing at the bleeping washing machine, and the other half swearing at the bleeping Dishdrawer. That's not self-censorship, the pricks of things bleep all the fucking time. The washing machine is a clusterfuck of buttons and lights which alarms pathetically if the load gets out of balance by so much as three socks' worth. All anyone wants in a washing machine is a big fuck-off vat with a big fuck-off dial and an On button, not the control panel off a fucking A380. Same goes for dishes. Dial, switch, ability to wash things. Nup. The Dishdrawer is the quintessence of design-led tossery, of pretence over substance; a clever idea which would be much fucking cleverer if it DID A DECENT FUCKING JOB OF WASHING THE DISHES. Instead, it films your wine glasses with detritus, leaves plates caked in meal runoff, floods itself, drowns its own electronics and goes fucking apeshit at you at 2am. I have spent more hours of my life decoding the service mode of that fucking dishwasher than I have servicing any of the last four cars I have owned.

Which leads to unpatriotic responses such as this:

All the Fisher & Paykel things are giving me the screaming shits today. JUST FUCKING WORK, YOU OVERCOMPLICATED PISS-BRITTLE WANKSOCKS
— Dr Yobbo (@DrYobbo) November 22, 2013

And so say all of me.

The Doctor is OUT.