I wish my new washing machine was as thick as the old one

My washing machine has a very high energy rating and naively I thought this somehow related to how much energy it uses.  It does and it doesn’t.  There’s such a thing in business as the cost-quality-time triangle.  A theoretical construct suggesting that there is geometric relationship between cost, quality and time whereby if one side of the triangle is cost, the other quality and the third time then total area of the triangle represents the total amount of bullshit talked by management consultants during the progress of the project.  Therefore in order for the triangle to maintain the same area if one changes the cost one must change the time and quality accordingly, if one changes the time one must change the cost and quality accordingly and if one changes the quality one must change the cost and time – otherwise one will end up with a quadrilateral and even Pythagoras don’t know what that means.

I always thought this was all bullshit until I bought an eco-friendly washing machine.  Although the washing machine is friendly to the environment it is decidedly unfriendly to the user.  Naively I had believed that the eco-friendliness of the machine was related somehow to how well it cleaned clothes.  However, it turns out that instead of making the spin more effective, the drying faster or cycles shorter it seems to manage to be eco-friendly by running extremely long programs.  Worse, it doesn’t tell you what it’s going to do before it does it. 

Instead of, as my old washing machine used to, running through a fixed but variable set of processes it has a number of options which seem, as far as I can work out, to weigh my washing before it starts and then decide the type of program its going to run with virtually no input from the user at all.  It really doesn’t give me any options between selecting the program and calculating how long the program is going to take or what it’s going to do during the program.  You put your washing in and it’s like a game of washing roulette to discover how long the program’s going to take. It does its own thing and woe betide any human with their own opinion.  Seriously it's smugger than Siri.  The core of its job snobbery is that will not allow one to separate the spin cycle, the washing cycle and the drying cycle from each other.  "Oh no I can't dry only," it seems to intone, "I'm a Wahser-Dryer".  Drying Only would make me a dryer and that's beneath me," seems to be the crux of its job snobbery.

It seems to me that my washing machine achieves it’s eco-friendliness by taking potentially forever, doing lots of complicated mathematics that it considers me too thick to want to know about and generally being as bossy as the late Nora Batty.  I wonder sometimes that it doesn’t chase me out the kitchen with a broom and demand that I stop getting under its feet all day.   

Honestly, it thinks it’s Jeeves but I’ve yet to see it reading any Spinoza.  Then again maybe one day that will happen.  Perhaps if I read it some philosophy it will tell me how it does my laundry.  At the moment it will not tell me as I only have an "undergraduate degree" in Physics - not an MSc or a PhD so couldn't possibly understand.