My dishwasher is running. There are knives in it. With wooden handles.
Back home, this would have been a good way to get howled at. Or possibly get one’s hide tanned. Apparently dishwashers are bad for wooden silverware. Now, being an old-fartass adult, I have a better solution to this quandary. Put the wood-handled knives, which I think belonged to a former housemate, in the dishwasher anyway. Use them in this manner to failure (possibly years from now), then get smart and replace them with knives that can be dishwashed.
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One of these days, whether it sounds like an appealing idea at this stage in my life or not, I will probably end up married. (Considering that the typical alternative is dying alone, yeah, getting hitched is sooner or later going to sound like a pretty good idea.) And once this happens to a guy, he’s begun inexorably down that slippery slope toward Kidsville. (The coefficient of friction on that slope varies for each relationship, but is typically less than infinity.) Upon entering the town of Marriageville (population: 2, in ideal cases) on a full head of steam, the first thing to do is settle into a house, fleshing it out with good furniture, power tools, big speakers eh-hem, floral patterns, and all this other weird stuff. One of these pieces of furniture will contain Fine China. Let’s ignore that one for now; if one of those appears in my house, it will be equipped with high voltage, caltrops and laser death rays just to avoid the howling when a piece in an undersecured china cabinet invariably gets broken. Which brings us to the Lesser Dinnerware, the kind mortals actually eat off of. My first post-marriage task (after carrying her over the threshold, letting go of her hair, and putting down the club) will be to source replaceable dinnerware. Because, upon crossing the city line into Kidsville, they hand you some free kids, which like to run around and, in the course of said running around, break shit. Advanced statistical models tell us that dishes are going to get accidentally smashed, dropped, fumbled, and/or pulverized by errant baseballs multiple times throughout the MTBF of a typical marriage-with-kids. Although a common parenting mistake (so says I as not-a-parent), there is no sense in getting universe-crashingly upset about this; it’s going to happen. Therefore, Limited Edition, Matched (unsigned int)n-piece Sets are a sucker’s game.
In tech products, be they electronic, mechanical (engine components), whatever, a discontinued part in an end product means a costly oh-shit-whaddwe-do-now redesign–those companies know this, and try hard to have a reputation of having their parts available for years, with a well-established and published lifecycle (Advance/Preliminary, Active production, Mature, End-Of-Life, Discontinued) so that engineers, fearing those costly Discontinueds, will comfortably use their parts. The same is not true for dishes. The final dinnerware specification will weigh such factors as aesthetics, volume capacity, microwave and dishwasher compatibility against the ability to replace elements of the set, i.e. expected production status over the next 10-15 years. If any non-crappo dishware maker applied this component-sourcing strategy and could make the promise of long-term stable production of each item, they’d make a killing.
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