Pris, thanks for giving me my smile for the day. It's one of those days I needed one. I have found it to be the case that the messiest cooks are usually the one who enjoy it the most. My Mama was the best cook I ever knew and she managed to dirty every pot/pan/dish in the house when she put on a spread. The biggest difference between her and me is that she enjoyed washing them after it was over. My dining room and kitchen are one big room. There used to be a wall between the two, but was removed when my husband remodeled. Being in the country, we also greet all our visitors from the back door. There wasn't even a PATH to the front door until we put one in. So, my kitchen is not only visible to everyone who makes it through the solarium to my back door, but the kitchen is where most of our guests and family congregates. The living room usually sits dark and empty when there are people around. I actually thank God that I am not too anal about cooking 'trails' because I'd be paranoid. Dirt, well that's another story. I mop every morning. But, I don't worry about flour trails, or apple peels hanging from a lamp shade. As for dogs and trails........that is what cracks me up. Mine has RADAR to any pile of anything on the floor. I can't even sweep my floor and make it to the dustpan before he awakens from a day long sleep just to walk through it.

Okay, we have one, and I end-arounded Miele Corporate and bought mine on eBay, saving around $350 IIRC. The unit I bought was perfect, in the crate, impeccably shipped and arrived in perfectly inoperable condition because the Miele Factory (the coffee machines are built in Switzerland) had failed to secure a plug-jack properly. The floating connection caused repeating faults in my unit, which led me to discover that I had no warranty at all on the machine. Meanwhile the dealer who sold it to me vanished from ebay, only to return with a new seller ID. I sent REPEATED inquiries to the seller asking about warranty and was COMPLETELY ignored. Lesson learned: If you buy from ebay, 1. Contact the seller first and find out who they are actually doing business as. 2. Make sure that the underlying store is an authorized Miele dealer. You can check that through the Miele website or by calling Miele. Do not mention ebay to Miele, EVER. They hate ebay and will screw you out of your warranty if they find out you purchased there. 3. Tell the seller that as a condition of sale you expect to be shipped a store receipt with the authorized dealer's name plainly listed as seller and that the terms of your factory warranty are included on the receipt. That receipt must not mention ebay. Get everything in writing from the dealer. With my coffee machine, Miele got THEIR dough, the dealer got HIS dough, via backdoor sale to move his stock, and I got reamed. Don't walk into that trick. There are dealers who have those things sitting around that they want to move and they will have NO problem dropping you into a crack where no light comes a shinin'. I fixed my own machine by opening it up and tracing around the harness till I found the loose PJ. (It came apart in my hand!) I plugged it back in securely and the machine has run flawlessly ever since. As to the machine, while it is NOT something real coffeegeek reviewers will ever find adequate, for us it is a godsend. Seriously. When we are staying at our city apartment and have to get by using the Keurig fill-a-basket, a sense of loneliness haunts our existence. But when we get home to our house and our Miele, our hearts bloom with contentment. You can get a great cuppa any time of day, with fancy foamy milk if you want. I really recommend that you select the plumbed version of the machine. You run a 1/4" PEX water line to your cutout, put an inline water filter on the supply, and then the machine takes care of keeping itself full of water. As far as the quality of the machine goes, despite the loose plug-jack, which probably occurred during a sensor testing regimen prior to packaging, the rest of the thing is really very nice quality. Tremendous engineering went into the design of components from a serviceability aspect. Everything pulls out of the front of the machine and is easy to get to. You open the door and everything is right there, easy to get at. We could not be happier. We picked a Bluestar range, Miele Speed Oven, and Miele Coffee System when we updated our Reagan-Era kitchen and we simply could not be happier. If I had it to do over again I would buy the exact same stuff but I would be sure to get the right receipt to mollify the price-fixers at Miele. Couple more helpful tips: The unit comes with a couple plastic containers that one could almost confuse with shipping spacers or something. They are NOT shipping spacers, they are used to clean and descale the machine. Hang onto them, you need 'em. Be VERY careful removing and replacing the lid on the milk thermos. The plastic pipes that suck up the milk are easily broken. You can superglue them back together, but you have to replace the entire lid if you want them really fixed and its close to $200. Miele charges 44 bucks for a box of 30 milk cleaning packets, which is ridiculous. But if you SMELL the cleaning solution they make when dissolved in water, and then smell the cleaning solution you get when you dissolve a scant teaspoon of OXYCLEAN in the same amount of water you will find that they are eerily similar. While I haven't sent the substances off to the lab for chromatographic analysis, I am quite confident, after two years of steady use, that Oxyclean works great to clean the milk system and that you do not need to spend the outrageous amount of money Miele demands for their precious cleaning packets.

I'd call Toshiba's customer service department.

Yes, I close it out too. It always surprises me though. I guess it's new. I never saw it until recently.