Simon Carr: The Kitchen Capitalist
I wanted chips - but the dog's eaten them
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Your support makes all the difference.The story so far: the author has sold his house to finance a manufacturing project in the hope of making a small fortune to finance his old age...
Right. Fine. As neat and tidy as a well-made bed. Everything in its place. Third prototype in full working order. All channels working. Circuit board remedied. Volume adjusted. The second chip under way and ready by the end of the week. The box on its way back from Wales. The tooling charges itemised and adjusted downwards.
It was mid-week that the enterprise was blessed with a sunburst of clarity. The package hadn't arrived on the Tuesday (that pesky post). It hadn't arrived by Wednesday morning. Had Wales failed to send it next-day delivery? No, Wales had failed to send it. I leaned against some railings in Parliament Square and listened to Wales saying that the prototype had stopped working. That they'd spent all Tuesday taking the circuit board to pieces and eventually found that speaker was incapable of handling the power. Why did that take all day? Why didn't that take eight minutes with one of those voltage measuring devices? And why didn't I ask that question? Because a sixth sense drove me directly on to the far more important question of the second chip. Was that ready? Half-way ready? Had anything been done at all?
Well, that second chip was still depending actually on getting the code to Oki in Japan and anyway Oki's FTP site was shut. And to be honest they couldn't e-mail it because their computer had broken down all Tuesday and was only fixed on Tuesday evening. And the dog? What about the dog? Surely the dog had eaten the instructions to ring me when...
Everything had gone a little faint at this point. People were looking at me warily so I assumed I was yelling into my mobile. Questions were drowning out the traffic. But chief among them was the lament: why does nothing happen as it should?
Then Warren e-mailed me. The speaker wasn't the problem. It was the position of the speaker. "Because of the speaker facing down, the structure does not have enough space to place an additional speaker in front, so that somehow makes the difference."
So, what's the real problem? Speaker capacity? Build quality? Componentry? I'm not technical enough to adjudicate. However, I do recognise complete, unmitigated bouncing bollocks when I hear it. This is nothing to do with the position of the speaker or the amplifier let alone an additional amplifier (an entirely new concept for this product).
But whatever it is, China is willing to take responsibility and to fix it. That's such a novel development I summon P2 back from Wales on a next day delivery. That'll be all right, won't it? You're sure? Nothing's been lost in the post yet, after all. All right, on your advice, then, I'll send for the prototype from Wales.
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