My wife and I recently bought a new dishwasher.

It's not that we were unhappy with our old dishwasher; it ran just fine if we got up early to shovel the coal and let the boiler in the engine build up a good head of steam. Unfortunately, a clip broke on one side of the cup rack, and repairing it was going to involve replacing everything except one of the rawhide door hinges, so we decided that it was time to go shopping.

As you might have guessed, it's been a while since we bought an appliance, and we were shocked at some of the advances in technology. I figured that a logical first step would be to check Consumer Reports to find out which models would get all the crud off the butter knives, and which ones were more likely to become sentient and destroy all human life.

The interesting thing about reading Consumer Reports is that their evaluators bring up a lot of things that never crossed your mind before. We have lived with our current dishwasher for more than eighteen years, and never once did I worry about how noisy it was. The theory has always been that any racket the thing could make is better than listening to me whining about hand-washing the dishes.

The reviews also talked a lot about how fast the dishwashers worked. Until now, my concept of dishwasher time has been that you started it, went away, and at some point in the future you would come back and the dishes would be clean. Now I found myself nodding with solemn approval at the model that was able to shave eleven seconds off the total job when using the pot scrubber mode by activating their unit's patented thermonuclear drying cycle.

One thing about which I had no doubt whatsoever was the color of the new dishwasher.

Let's just step aside for a minute here and have a little chat. Ordinarily, I would be about as concerned with the color of  something like this as I am with the color of the drapes we have in the guest bedroom. At least, I assume we have drapes in there.

But a few years ago I had to replace the only "appliance" in the house I actually care about - my little gas grill, Bob. I replaced Bob with a modern masterpiece, a glittering behemoth that I lovingly call "The Enterprise."

The Enterprise is made out of stainless steel!

Do you have any idea how emotionally fulfilling stainless steel is to a guy? It has a cool, technological vibe. It's industrial. It's powerful. It's the diametric opposite of the sissified taffy-colored ranges and refrigerators and dishwashers that mince around in my memories of my mother's kitchen.

So I was determined that I was not going to buy a mere dishwasher. I was going to bring our kitchen into the twenty-first century. I was going to own the Millennium Falcon with a pre-rinse option.

Strangely, my wife was slightly less passionate about that whole stainless steel thing. I think her exact words were, "There is absolutely no way we're getting stainless steel. None. Nada. Not a chance. Put it out of your mind. Not gonna happen. Uh uh. Nope." It turns out, stainless steel shows fingerprints. As she walked away I thought I heard her mutter, "Moron!"

My wife had decided that she wanted our dishwasher in a color called "Biscuit" - which is a sort of "taffy" color. I was just going to have to forget about having an appliance that could make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs. With a heavy heart, I headed for the stores.

It didn't take long to find the perfect model, at the perfect price. But as we were finalizing the deal, the saleswoman told us that our ideal dishwasher was not available in Biscuit, even as a special order. But it could be had, at an even better price, in black.

And then the miracle happened. My wife said, "OK, no problem. Black would be nice." I could hardly believe my luck. We brought home the only thing in the universe that could be better than an under-counter Millennium Falcon.

We got Darth Vader!

Next week, installing Darth Vader.

Copyright © 2011, Michael Ball

Mike Ball is the Erma Bombeck Award-winning author of "What I've Learned So Far..." and the book What I've Learned So Far... Part I: Bikes, Docks & Slush Nuggets.